DVDs on an external hard drive

Hi all

Sorry if this has been asked before but a search didn't throw up any answers.

We're heading off for 6 weeks and have two kids. I want to bring a selection of their DVDs to keep them amused on the plane etc. but don't want to take up loads of space on the iPad.

Is there any way I can rip them onto a USB hard drive and play them from there?

Thanks

Ima

 

The bad news is that you can't just plug an external drive in and watch movies from it -so there's no cheap and easy option.

There are some easy (but not cheap) options around which are specially designed drives - a recent one launched which acted as it's own wifi server to stream conent.
Or you might find a cheap (but not particularly easy) option through some of the jailbreak hacks, although this doesn't work for the ipad2.

Will you have decent wifi access? I suppose you could try uploading movies to dropbox or something similar? Or a remote streaming app if you can store the files on a pc which can be left running while you're away?