Prior to our most recent trip, our third Montana tour, we looked in to a number of different in-car entertainment systems to keep our tiny overlords in the backseat happy. Some options were so cheap we knew they’d never work, and others so expensive we knew we couldn’t afford them, but we settled on headrest DVD players, and at the risk of letting my nefarious neighbors know how great they are, I have to tell you, they really saved our bacon.
We started by going to the local car audio shops to find out what should be looking at, but they all quoted us anywhere from $2,000 to $5,000 to buy and install them. That’s not just impractical, it’s absurd. The car only cost $3,700, why would I double-down on my investment in ways I’d never get it back like that?
We already had a $150 set of portable DVD players from WalMart, but they died on us a good 10-minutes after the warranty expired, so we were back square one on that front, but I’d surely buy them again before dumping thousands into auto entertainment I’d never even get to see from my vantage point.
I found a set of “universal” DVD headsets on eBay for under $400, then found a young entrepreneur on Craig’s List willing to install them for $100. I figured the risk was worth it, and boy was I right. Exercise extreme caution if you go this route, as you could be taken advantage of by an unscrupulous merchant or unprofessional installer, but we made out like Frito Banditos.
Each headset has its own DVD player, so we can run two different movies if we want, or we can run a single flick on both. They can also play 16-bit games you can download to an SD card or a burnt CD, and it came with two game controllers. How about that for keeping the munchkins entertained?
But it’s where we get down to audio that we’re truly blessed. We can set them to play sound out of the headrests, or the kids can listen to the sound via IR wireless signal to their headphones. And if I really want to go crazy, I can set it to broadcast a short-range FM signal I can pick up on my stereo, so we can all here the same thing in full fidelity.
So the kids can play their games, or watch their movies (or do one of each at any given time) and I can choose whether I want it broadcast van-wide, quietly blurting from the headrest speakers, or if I want them to don their headphones and leave me in peace.
When it comes to lengthy car rides, this is more important than you might realize.
Sure, the arguments from the backseat persist, but they’re quickly resolved, and as long as you keep your daily drive time under the two-film time frame, you’re going to arrive at your destination with a level of sanity practically unimagined by our parents.