[TriLUG] mostly OT: movies on the go?

[Igor Partola via TriLUG]

I have thought about doing something with my car to allow us to play loads
of movies. It already has a built-in DVD player, but that would mean toting
a huge number of DVD's with me. Fortunately, the video system does have an
RCA input so I could theoretically hook up something like a Raspberry Pi to
it with XBMC running. Here's where I stopped thinking about it though: the
Raspberry Pi has no internal batter backup, and has no ability to power
itself off. So when I kill the engine, the RPi would just turn right off
and that would do really bad things to the filesystem. Turns out that
because XBMC runs a database to keep all the metadata, and cutting the
power to it easily corrupts it.

Now, I did find a few interesting projects that try to fix this. For
example, one had a harness which would connect directly to the car battery,
but also to the cigarette lighter and detect when the power was cut to shut
down the RPi. However, at the time I was looking into this they were
expensive and I didn't want to bother.

Long story short, a laptop hidden under the seat + a screen would most
likely do it in my case. If I didn't have a built-in screen, I'd go for a
couple of $80 tablets.

Igor