Nextbase NB48AC / SDV48AC Twin 7-inch Portable DVD Players with Car Kit and Integrated Battery

Wish I could give it 4.5 stars.

Everything works, the screens look good. I like the car headrest mounting system. It came with everything you need to watch two different films or the same on two screens. We'll probably use it in the latter mode most of the time but it's nice to have different options especially for in a year or two when the kids get a bit older.

Three niggles to consider:
1) The AV in/out cable needs jiggling sometimes to work properly. When the cable is fully inserted I still sometimes need to rotate it to make the connection. Once working, it's ok.
2) I bought it to use mostly with movies on an SD card. I bought a 16gb SD card and loaded it with kids films. To play these files, you turn on the screen and you need to select "mode" and scroll to "SD" and then "movie" before it finds the files to play. Then it works fine while you drive along. However, if you then turn off and unplug the players to hide them away, and then want to resume again later the player didn't remember what mode we were in previously and continue the film where we stopped. So I had to go back scrolling through the menu to find the movie and then fast forward to the point in the film. It doesn't take very long, but it would be better if it was more intelligent.
3) To make the second screen show what the other screen is playing you need to used the supplied remote control. There is no button on the unit to press to select "AV in". It's a bit annoying that they can't be operated in this way without the remote.

Overall, I'm happy, and if they had made it a bit more clever, I would have given 5 stars.

The good - the units seem pretty robust, the screens are bright, and the internal batteries do appear to last the claimed 2 hours - ideal for our regular 1.5 hour trips as it means no need to plug in the overlong double power lead. (Sadly won't be able to get away with that on holiday, 8 hours or so in the car).

Also despite the manual claiming a 4GB limit on the memory cards or flash drives, in fact I've filled two 16GB (class 4) SDHC cards and those work fine (there are around 20 films on each).

The bad - with all our childrens' DVDs already ripped and available as VOB folders or MKV files (for a media player), I thought it would be straightforward to encode them for these units. However it took a while to find the right software to use as both video and audio must be correctly encoded; the units are pretty inflexible. The manual recommends Divx, but Divx's own conversion tool wouldn't read the source files (at least not the MKV files, and I didn't want lots of half-hour film bits). For info I eventually found "Any Video Converter" worked, though it took a couple of attempts to persuade it not to hard-encode extra black bars above and below the picture, resulting in only a small amount of the screen being used - still not quite sure how I fixed it...

You do need to be careful with filenaming, particularly with "episode" type material - you only see the first 17 characters of the filename, which isn't much (eg prefix a number of items with "Charlie&Lola" and you've used 12 already). And you cannot sort the order in which the files appear on the units - I haven't yet worked out what order they are actually in, but whatever it is, it is not alphabetic. Certainly intuitive when finding one film from the list spanning four screens or more.

As commented elsewhere, when switched on these default back to DVD so you can't restart an SD or flash drive movie from where you last left it. (DVDs restart from the last played position).

Connecting the two units to play one movie requires the cable, and one screen to be switched over which is only possible from the remote. There's nothing to stop an excitable 6-year old then accidentally switching the other screen, resulting in frustration as nothing seems to work. Ends up with tears, and a roadside stop to sort it out. And you can't leave the cable in place if you then decide to watch different films as the audio from both is mixed across the two units even when the video has been switched back, so be prepared for switching that cable in and out from time to time on the move.

If you actually want to use DVDs instead of SD cards or flash cards, bear in mind your children might find it difficult to achieve this so you'll likely only be able to do this for them at stops instead of leaving them to it - the two straps coming down the front edges of the screen need to be unstuck before you can open up the DVD hinge, which they might not be able to reach anyway. No clever slidey-in DVD slots here.

And I will also have a gripe about the screen resolution, which is pretty awful (480x238), though that's not just this unit - other brands' (Bush, Philips) players seem to be just as bad. I would describe it as adequate for watching something you've already seen countless times before on a better screen (which I suppose is the target audience, for children). It's also why I went for the 7in rather than 9in, as the larger unit still also has the same poor resolution and would look even more blocky.

These seem to be be the best of what's a fairly bad bunch. Overall it feels like a product both designed and built several years ago, with none of the usability tweaks we've become used to more recently.

In truth, I suspect cheap tablets will kill these products off over the coming year as they get cheaper (eg the Archos/Arnova tablets) - but I couldn't wait that long as I was replacing a previous player which broke and didn't want to end up paying £200+. Also, cheap tablets don't come with headrest mounts (heads-up helps stave off carsickness) or remote controls, and as far as I know don't allow you to span one film across to a second screen. In the meantime, these do the job, but be aware they are passable rather than great.

Bought for the grandaughters in the car. Easily attaches to the headrest. They can watch different DVD's and also use in the house. No complaints