I have couple of long car rides ahead of me - several of them with my kids who are not great in the car (by virtue of not having spent a whole lot of time in the car) and I was thinking of getting them a Video Player so that they could each watch what they want during the drive.
While I could buy one of those DVD players with a screen, they just seem silly - plus I'm moving away from spinning discs and non-digitized media.
I have a Nexus 7 2013 model that I like a far amount - I'd was thinking of buying two 32GB versions of the 2012 model (currently on newegg for 119$) and using those for this purpose.
Given that I'm less familiar with the 2012 model I thought I'd pose the question - does this sound like a good plan? Is the 2012 model ok (the recent feedback on Newegg is not the greatest)?
sounds like a good idea. for kids it's more than enough. those bad review are from geeks who have nothing better to do to complain about 120 messily bucks.
You could just grab 2 off-contract Moto Gs (pretty sure they're $50 at bestbuy right now, and $70 at amazon). You'll save a bit and they'll get devices that are pocketable, semi-water resistant and probably easier to handle as well. You could get one of those microUSB flash drives (or use a USB flash drive+ OTG adaptor) to store movies on as well.
You could always get something like the EVGA Tegra Note 7 too, it's a bit more expensive but it's thinner, lighter, faster, has front facing speakers and (most importantly) has a MicroSD slot.
Ended up with the Nexus 7. I also bought a Corsair Voyager Air - which is sort of a cool device - 1TB drive with built in battery and wireless. Up to 5 devices can access content on it wirelessly. So I just have to maintain one drive worth of media and everyone in the car can share that one drive. Sort of killer. It also acts as an internet passthrough - so you can set it up with, say the wireless in a hotel room, and then all your devices can access that one connection point.
I second MX Video Player. It's basically the VLC player equivalent for Android. It'll play any and all video files, has a nice and clean UI, and some gesture controls (volume & fast forward/backward).
Could also just use VLC. Why use basically the equivalent to VLC when you have VLC. It also works great just give it a run through so you can shout how to use it if they complain. Valid for what ever player you choose.