Anyone who has ever taken a road trip with children will understand that the process can be highly stressful. There are a number of ways to keep children entertained while driving. You could go the common route, of playing the alphabet game on car license plates, but let’s face it: this is the 21st Century. Playing “I spy with my little eye” for 8 hours quickly becomes tedious and boring… so you could step it up a notch, and keep the kids entertained with a portable car DVD player.

Most car DVD systems and players now sport a longer battery life than your laptop, and in this age of advancing technology they are becoming smaller and more compact. There are literally hundreds of portable DVD players out there, in a vast range of prices.

A recommendation I would give is to stick to the trusted brands, such as Sony. Other unknown brands may be cheaper, but at least with a well-known company, you can trust what you are buying. You will not get this piece of mind with unproven brands. Also, you can get well known brands for great prices by shopping around online: try places like Amazon, or Google shopping for sales and special offers. Checking user reviews before you buy is a good way to find out what models to avoid and which ones are a good value.

The two most important factors in selecting a portable car DVD player are the battery life, and the size of the screen. If you have three kids in the back seat, obviously you’re going to want to consider a larger screen. Also, you don’t want your DVD player’s battery to die half way through another exciting round of Finding Nemo… when you still have 3 hours left in the car. Bear in mind though that you can also get accessories for use in the car, such as a charger. So shop around, and find the perfect car DVD system for you, your family, and your lifestyle!

By: Darcy H.

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Best Car DVD Players Reviewed

There generally are two differing kinds of car DVD player setups available these days. Original equipment makers or OEM players come with the cars right from the factory while aftermarket players can be bought in a number of different ways and then installed in the automobile. Many of these new DVD players feature navigation capabilities, too. There is a question that many folks are asking, what’s GPS and why are GPS DVD car players so good?

For people that don’t know, GPS stands for world Positioning System. Many miles overhead, out in space, there are a number of satellites specifically dedicated to beam down location info to devices fitted out to read those beams. DVD car players equipped with GPS navigation systems can pick up those signals, which are translated into easy-to-read maps and such like and which can keep someone that is basically directionally-challenged from getting lost while going down to the neighborhood shop for a gallon of milk. All kidding aside, GPS is a way to literally go from one’s stoop in Hartford,Connecticut and take the fastest route to another person’s stoop out in San Diego, California.

Many GPS-equipped DVD car players will be able to point out places of interest, the least expensive gasoline and the best hotels or motels along the way. The convenience they offer cannot be overstated. Literally, the sorts of devices that can work with GPS nowadays is almost endless. Even the least expensive cell telephones around can be supplied with GPS capability. There are a number of very inexpensive GPS devices on the market that can be hooked into a power outlet in a car, too though someone who’s heavy about their automobile will need to have their DVD car player supplied with GPS.

Car DVD players are glorious pieces of gear. They fundamentally are really strong computers, for absence of a better method of explaining what they can do. They sometimes have a Windows-based processor chip and a decent quantity of computer memory to handle all of their tasks. They also make for great platforms for a GPS system, which is easily included in even the least expensive auto DVD player nowadays. Keep in mind, that GPS in a car DVD player likely works better when the player itself is what’s called a dual zone, rather than a single sector DVD player.

That’s because the player is in a position to better separate functions into different zones, keeping spillover from those functions from interfering with the GPS receiver in the automobile DVD player. They seem to be far better than those car DVD players without GPS, and only cost a very small sum of money more. In the end, when one is going to install a player in their car, why not go for the full-boat and make sure it has GPS? It’ll come in terribly handy.

By: Thomas Wang

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Best Car DVD Players Reviewed

Today’s car DVD players are a big step up from the players of just a couple of years ago. They can do things, in other words, that the basic DVD players of just several years ago couldn’t come close to doing.

In North America, these players make use of a digital video signal different from signals broadcast in other parts of the world, making answering the question “Car DVD player mysteries: What is ATSC?” somewhat important.

ATSC is the abbreviation of “Advanced Television Systems Committee.” In short, it is the standard for digital broadcasts that replaced the old NTSC standards for analog television and video broadcasts.

In June of 2009, the United States became the first country in North America to stop broadcasting analog signals and shift to completely to the digital ATSC signals. Canada will follow suit in 2011 and Mexico by 2021.

Basically, most devices equipped to receive and then display digital television signals?especially mobile devices like car DVD players?will feature the ATSC method and industry standard for doing so.

Analog television signals have almost completely disappeared these days in North America, though Mexico will lag behind for another decade, and ATSC as the standard was agreed upon not too long ago, though it was first developed in the early 1990s.

The ancestor to ATSC is actually the HDTV (”high definition television”) standard that many of us have grown used to over the last decade.

It is a big improvement over HDTV standards, as a matter of fact, in the way it can produce wide screen images and even surround sound using certain Dolby Digital sound improvement technologies. In effect, it is being used to sharpen picture and sound in even small screen devices such as car DVD players.

The way that it can do this in something like a car DVD player’s display screen is because there are a number of “subchannels” that can be supported by the device that makes use of ATSC technology tuners. Additionally, these new standards can also be thought of as the ways in which the common MPEG video streaming format is controlled by a device with ATSC.

In effect, ATSC controls the digital video broadcast stream by “modulating” the digital signal so that a great deal of information can be sent along at once and then decoded quickly at the other end (the car DVD player, for example).

Around the world, there are several other standards for digital video broadcast of television signals. The most common and widespread is DVB-T, which is found widely in Europe and the British Commonwealth in addition to several Asian and South American countries, so keep that in mind before buying a player.

It is easy enough to figure out if the device that is going to be purchased has ATSC as its primary decoding system by looking at the box or going to the ATSC website and looking at the map of where in the world ATSC is the standard.

For North America, especially the United States and Canada, more and more of these devices are being produced, so it is a sure bet that any new device will feature this broadcast decoding tuner. So then; for those considering going for one of these players, knowing a bit about how they decode signals can come in handy, it seems.

By: Rose Li

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Best Car DVD Players Reviewed