[TriLUG] mostly OT: movies on the go?

[Dewey Hylton via TriLUG]

i have two children, aged 9 and 12. we make (sometimes long) family road trips. they do read, but we've always offered movies to pass the time as well.

we started out with a (horrible) vhs player and screen built into the vehicle. when that vehicle went away, i hacked fedora (linux!) onto an OLPC laptop and played movies via vlc and a thumb drive. that hardware died, and i purchased two portable dvd players with built-in screens that hang from the backs of the front seat headrest. one of those has since died and the other is unreliable. so i'm on the hunt for a better way to do this ...

my favorite was the OLPC method, simply because managing thumb drives is so easy; so what i'm looking for first is some way to play movies off a thumb drive or even an SD card. even the cheap laptops seem overly expensive for this use. the laptops i have currently would work but wouldn't last a whole movie before their aged batteries were drained. i've considered a raspberry pi solution but am so far unsure about how to manage the need for keyboard/mouse and what type of display i'd need.

would anyone like to make a recommendation? detailed solution involving a raspberry pi would be cool. are tablets an option? i believe vlc is available for android ... does anyone make a relatively cheap android tablet which could play a movie and read from some kind of removable media?

just starting the discovery process tonight, but our next trip is only a few weeks away ...