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Road Trip Dad 101: Entertaining Your Child

Bringing Your DVD Collection with You on the Road

By Christopher BayonetPublished 6 years ago 3 min read
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My daughter is part of a local YMCA swim team, some of these meets are often about 2+ hours away with her only being in one session or the other which means some nights/times spent in hotel rooms.

Often the first step is to find an "inexpensive" hotel (which often means without a lot of bells and whistles (or access to some of the general "unwinding" shows we enjoy in the evening). My preferred method is often using Expedia.

Now since we are in these "inexpensive" hotels entertaining a under 10 year old child in a small room can be challenging at best. With that in mind I have begun the process of being able to take our not-so meager DVD/Blu-Ray collection with us on the road without needing luggage for that and/or a player of such.

While services like Netflix, AmazonPrime, and Hulu are great—they don't have everything nor do they allow us access to our saved recordings at home.

The first step of this process was acquisition of a simple NAS Device which could run Plex out of the box. I opted for the 3TB version of Seagate's Personal Cloud, but their 4TB version isn't that bad of price tag as well. Roughly you can fit 100 DVDs per 1TB, so gauge your collection appropriately. The main benefit with the Seagate Personal Cloud is that it has a 3.0 USB port on it so you can easily add an external hard drive to expand your capacity.

With the two devices above, you would wind up with 12TB of Storage or the ability to bring over 1,000 DVDs with you on the road.

Plex, at its basic level allows you personally to access all your recordings as long as you have Internet access (which most hotels will have) and it's approximately $5 per device to connect via app.

There are apps available on Kindles, Android, and iOS devices; meaning the greatest amount of flexibility for all families.

Our daughter has a Kindle Fire 7 HD which we can load Plex onto to allow her to access her videos from there, as well as loading Xfinity's Stream App which will allow her to access the recordings.

I personally use a Kindle Fire 10 to access my videos from work while I am on my lunch unwinding or even at Swim Practice where I am watching her but also need some type of "noise buffer" to limit the amount of noise echoing around on the pool deck as I like to be there so my daughter can see me as I watch her practice, rather than socializing with the other parents at the expense of watching our children.

The final step of this is a device which can stream both Xfinity's Stream App as well as Plex's App. My preferred option is the Kindle Fire Stick as it is slim, fits easily into my backpack which I carry with me, and can be hooked up to any TV's HDMI slot (which will allow me to utilize the TV provided by the hotel to stream the videos).

Alternatively there's also the Kindle Fire HD if you want a higher quality... for slightly more cost.

So by using the items above, you should be able to take your DVD collection as well as access you recorded shows from home while on a road trip with your family for just around $200 dollars, which can save you more on renting movies in your hotel room or even having to book a more expensive room each time you travel; thereby saving more than the initial cost on your travel.

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