Bypassing the DVD player with an iPad in our Honda Odyssey

We recently purchased a 2015 Honda Odyssey. We are excited for the extra interior space that it provides, and it is a smooth ride. But there’s a small technology issue…

The car comes with a rear entertainment system that includes a DVD player. Very 2005. The last thing I want is to have multiple DVDs to store in the car and to deal with all that. As I’ve written about previously, our entire movie collection is digital and housed on a Plex server.

Plex’s subscription service allows for downloads to your devices so they can be played back offline. You can also choose the quality of the downloads, which can benefits us since we have a 16GB iPad mini. We can download more movies at a smaller quality than downloading them at full quality.

Our Odyssey has an RCA input located next to the very back seat on the drivers side. I purchased a 12-foot RCA extension cable, and ran it from the input in the back of the car, under the floor mats, towards the center console up front.

From there, the RCA cable attaches to an RCA to HDMI converter which converts both the audio and video.

Finally, the HDMI connects to an Apple lightning to HDMI adapter which will connect to our iPad mini up front.

The added benefit to this is when you are trying to navigate through a DVD from the front seat, you can’t see the rear display. Using this configuration with the iPad, the displays are mirrored, making it easy to navigate between movies.

So for less than $70 (thanks, Apple) we can travel with our kids’ favorite movies, all stored on one device that can be easily navigated while we travel.