Wireless Router w/USB in car to stream movies to tablets??

[bobn4burton]

OK...so my kids each have a 7" tablet. I get sick of changing out the movies all the time because of limited storage space on the tablets. So I had an idea...what if I just got a wireless router with USB storage port and then I could just get a usb hard drive with all the movies on it and attach it to the wireless router and then just put that in the car for road trips. Then both tablets could just connect up to the router/network share and stream whatever movie they wanted to watch.

They only watch movies in the car and at home...so streaming the movies instead of having them locally on the tablets shouldn't be a problem.

So here are my wants for a router:
1. "Fast enough" USB/HDD read speeds to stream at least two movie streams.
2. I'm not eve sure what bit rate I'm talking about with the movies...but plan to transcode all the movies to either h.264 480p (dvd rips) or h.264 720p (blu-ray rips). Hopefully file sizes will be anywhere from 700meg-3gig for a two hour movie.
3. Again...all movies will be transferred onto the USB hdd via USB on my main computer...so I'm not worried about write speeds. And read speeds just need to be good enough to handle a couple video streams.
4. Obviously wifi range doesn't matter to me.
5. I'm assuming I'll need an N router to handle the video streaming.
6. Hopefully there is a router that will saved the USB hdd mount config so I can detach the hard drive, plug into my main pc and transfer movies, and then re-attach to the router without having to reconfigure anything on the router side (it's OK if router needs to be powered down before disconnecting/reconnecting the USB hdd).

Any thoughts...advice? Will this work very well?

 

[stevech]

Your tablets lack a USB port? Mine has one (Android, Acer).

 

[tipstir]

Which tablet are you using? Most can handle streaming over your network. If use the Toshiba Media Player it can access Windows Shares on your network and stream the Movies over WiFi. Or you can setup Windows 7 PC use it as Media Server running IIS7 then on each tablet can be set to main HTML page that host your videos so each child tablet can stream the videos. This is another way to do it. Some apps like QQPlayer is a good one for playing any type of movies or videos.

Another one that cost $3 bucks is called: MediaHouse-Pro UPnP / DLNA can stream off your NAS, PC Server and etc..

 

[sfx2000]

MiFi type of device with an SD card and tightly compressed media?

Check with your wireless vendors, many of the MiFi type devices can share SD card content via SMB if your tablet allows for that...

The other option, which might be cheaper, is to look for a solution which has LCD's strapped to the back of the headrest... might be easier in the long run...

 

[bobn4burton]

Thanks for the suggestions so far guys.

One tablet is a Nexus 7 and the other is an Archos 70 (soon to be updated to Nexus 7).

I think I have the streaming to android tablet part down OK. There are many options and shouldn't be a problem.

I could use the USB port, but that would only service one tablet with one external hdd. So I wanted an option to use just one hdd storage location that could be shared with all tablets/devices in the car.

My biggest questions lie in router choice and the numbered points I had above...

 

[thiggins]

All routers can be powered from DC, usually 12V, so you just need a suitable car power adapter.

Easiest thing to do is run an experiment with your proposed setup to see if it can handle the two streams or profile the bandwidth use using NetMeter while running the streams.

Router with fastest NTFS and FAT32 read speed is Cisco Linksys E4200v2/E4500. Buy a refurb from the Cisco store and you get 30 days to try it out.