Brad's World

Considering a factory or dealer installed DVD player option in your next new car? You can pay anywhere from $1500 to $2500 for one of these. How about a system for about half the price which can do more?

I read an article this morning about streaming video to an iPhone or iPod Touch. Both offer WiFi web browsing. In the article they point out you could easily setup a web server with video content and stream that to the device. Of course you have to be in range of the server -- but now you aren't limited to 8GB or 16GB of storage!

Mean while.. back in the car.

I have worked this year to build a library of kids movies for my daughter to watch on my 60GB video iPod when we go on trips. She loves it. Its much more versatile that a DVD player since there are no discs to carry around and we can take it into restaurants, or the doctors office, etc. The only problem is the iPod disk is getting full very quickly.

What's the next step? Buy a bigger iPod? Problem. The new iPod touch in its largest configuration (16GB) will not hold my ever expanding collection of videos. What to do? How about offloading the video to a server and accessing your content with a web browser?

Here is all you need:

1. An iPhone or iPod Touch to watch videos.
2. A Mac mini or small footprint PC (something small enough to be tucked in a car) to host a web server and your video files.
3. A library of mp4 files (video files friendly to your Apple device)
4. A power inverter to power your Mac mini or PC.
5. A small uninterruptable power supply so your computer can sleep between trips (instead of hard shutdowns and rebooting when you get gas)

Load up the computer with video in a directory known to a web server, start it up and off you go. You could use Apple Remote Desktop (or some other similar tool) to manage the system when you are parked at home.

Wow! That's it.. The only hard part is building a library of movie content. With the $800-$1000 I would save over a DVD player from my car dealer, I could buy 70-100 kids movies at the iTunes Store.

Now if I could only get Red Robin and my pediatricians office to setup a video web server for the kids visiting the office/restaurant with their iPod Touch. Hey.. theres my next business idea.. I predict a gold mine for whoever begins selling such a device.. Oops.. I would bet there is just such a device in the secret labs of Cupertino. (Sitting on top of the prototype for the just announced Starbucks iTunes WiFi Music Store server no doubt.)