How do you do back seat entertainment w/o Pre-Wire?
 

My daughter bought a CPO GL450. She has three little children, who have grown accustomed to the built in entertainment system she had in her previous Toyota mini van. The GL is not "pre wired." Would love to hear suggestions to keep the kids occupied on long trips. Thanks!

iPads with headphones! Everyone watches what they want!

kinda like same situation that i am in. i tried couple of things.


a. plugin a router with a USB port into back cigarette lighter via a DC converter and hide the router in the spare tire area. dont need a very powerful or big sized router. a small router with hidden antenna should be good enough. i used a cisco E4200 (an old one kicking around). created a file share on the router with a usb and copied all movies there. a 64GB stick was good enough to hold good chunk. then on the iPads installed VLC player and they were able to stream videos independently.


b. a bit more digging into the app revealed that i could download the movies directly onto iPad so no need of a router. now i got three iPads and copied the movies to each one's taste. (i got a 12 year old, 8 year old and a 4 year old so tastes vary). one thing to keep in mind is to ensure you have newer generations of iPads as a first gen iPad mini couldnt play movies that were in mkv format.

FYI, the "pre-wire" is only for the MB dealer installed accessory system. Much better options out there for less $$.

iPad and all are great. How about where to get the movies to load into the iPad or USB drive??

While the kids are still young, I suppose having DVDs borrowed from library or your own stash will work as well.

I bought these when I initially got the GL but returned them subsequently.


I think the best solution is to add a tablet plan to your TMO acct so you may stream Netflix/Amazon/Hulu/etc without consuming data OR download movies for offline viewing.