This Synced DIY Car Entertainment System Keeps the Whole Family Happy

In-car entertainment systems are absolute miracles for parents taking kids on road trips. Give the children screens to look at and you can drive all day without losing your mind — or so I hear. If your minivan didn’t come with such screens and you want a really nifty solution, check out this DIY entertainment system that stays in sync.

Albert developed this in-car entertainment system for his own family’s use and it has a handful of pretty awesome features:

• PoE: Only a single cable necessary for each seat/screen
• Offline: Plays media from local storage via Kodi
• Expandable: It is easy to add as many screens as you need
• Sync: Viewers can optionally choose to sync playback, so they can watch movies together

Personally, I think that last feature is the best one. It is nice to be able to watch something with another person and this makes that seamless, while still giving each person an optimal viewing experience. That's particularly important if the audio comes through the car's stereo, as this is capable of providing.

This does, however, come at a cost. The alternative for most people would be something like a set of Amazon Fire Tablets, which are less than $100 each. This system costs about $200 per screen, plus the cost of the shared hardware.

That per-screen cost is a result of the robust hardware, which consists of a Raspberry Pi 4 Model B, a PoE (Power-over-Ethernet) HAT, and an HD touchscreen LCD panel. Fortunately, the shared hardware is pretty reasonable. That includes a pocket router, a PoE switch, and USB storage for media.

The software is based on a DLNA media server running on the pocket router and Kodi on each Raspberry Pi. That should be quick and easy for most “techy” people to set up.