Half term ski trip approaches (yay!) along with lots of sitting about at airports and a 3.5 hour coach transfer to/from the resort with two young kids (boo!).

To save my own sanity, and anyone else unfortunate enough to be travelling with us, I plan to load up their Hudls with a ton of kids films, TV etc so we can deploy the electronic babysitters.

So… what’s the best way to go about this?

I’m guessing the options for getting media are:

– rip movies from the various DVDs we have sitting about (painfully slow on my old PC)
– buy/rent movies from Amazon (expensive)
– torrent a whole bunch of stuff (and hope it doesn’t turn out to be pron)
– download a whole bunch of programmes from iPlayer

Any other good sources?

Next issue is storage: the hudl 2s are only 16GB and a lot of that is used already. They can take microSD cards, but I’m not sure which apps can use those (not much experience of Android). Can the iPlayer app be instructed to use the card for storage for example?

Final issue is battery life: obviously I’m going to need a whopping big power bank to keep things topped up.

One thing I did come across is the HooToo TripMate Titan, which is a 10400mAh battery pack but also a wireless router/bridge which in theory would let me stick all the movies etc onto one flash drive and then stream them to both hudls (as described here).

Might be a good approach, though I’m thinking a couple of big SD cards might be easier.

Thoughts and experiences please?

loads of disney films on pirate bay and just search cartoons, there’s tons. dl avis and use the VLC media player, it’s faultless.

Snap, load things onto a Micro SD then use VLC, its what we do for ours.

Thanks yeah torrent is definitely an option.

(And I don’t even feel particularly guilty about “pirating” as I’m pretty sure we already own every Disney film ever made on DVD anyway).

I’ve used VLC on other devices so that’s a good shout too.

The official iPlayer app won’t let you use the SD card for storage.
Instead you could use get_iplayer, which will let you grab the video files. Then you can copy those onto the card, and play using VLC.

Thanks CraigW that’s very useful!

I’ve used Amazon prime the last couple of times we’ve been away. I’ve just downloaded some free films off Amazon and you can watch them offline for 2 days before you need to reconnect to the internet to ‘refresh’ them. Then cancel it when we get home, unless you already have Amazon prime or want to keep it afterwards it’ll only cost £7.99.

They can take microSD cards, but I’m not sure which apps can use those

Apps aside, you’ll certainly be able to use it for standalone media.

MX Player is the best video player I’ve found on Android (TBF I’ve not tried the VLC app – it’s my go-to on the PC though).

MX Player is the best video player I’ve found on Android

This

Dual usb keys are very handy for this too.

The android tablets can read them using the micro USB and then you can plug them into to the USB port on a TV when you get where you are going

Like this one

I’ve got a couple of those, they’re absolutely brilliant.

I’d be a little wary of using it on a kid’s tablet other than for copying to / from it though, I don’t imagine the connection would fare terribly well if it got dropped with the drive plugged in.

Might be obvious to most but turning down the screen brightness on my Hudl made quite a difference to battery life and films are still entirely watchable.

Netflix lets you download some content now.