Product Description
Brand New Tan Headrest package with DVD with 2 Wireless Controllers: No messy wires everywhere in your car anymore, your children will enjoy the games much more. You have the luxury to watch different movies without fights anymore! Phew! FM Transmitter: Easy to connect to your quality sound system on your car without hassle. AV in/out: It’s just another convenient thing to connect your AV devices directly 7 inch Sharp TFT LCD screen: Now you can enjoy high quality m… More >>
#1 by A. Clark on July 2, 2010 - 8:45 pm
The DVD players are sturdy and offer dozens of functions not found on OEM systems. The guts of the DVD players are clearly marked Sony. The tan head rests are well constructed and they match the leather in our Navigator. They play DVD-Rs and Video CDs with no issues. Movies can also be watched from a thumb drive or an SD card in several different digital formats. Some MP4s will play, others won’t. The head phones have two channels and work perfectly with either DVD player. Video quality is surprisingly good, especially after changing the default setting of PAL to NTSC. Basic functions are on the front of the DVD player, but advanced functions require you use the remote control. The 32 BIT games are for children over 10. The 8 BIT games (optional) are old 1970-1980s arcade favorites and the younger kids love them.
Installation was easy taking about 90 minutes to do a professional level job. The pre-installed Power and Video/Audio-Out line runs down one post of the head rest while the Video/Audio-In line runs down the other post. The cables dropped through the back of the seat and were easily routed down the side of the seat and beneath the center console (comepletely out of sight). I removed the back panel of the center console where I connected the Video/Audio cables and tapped off of a cigarette lighter power cable for the 12VDC. The cables are very long giving you all kinds of cable routing options. End result was an OEM style DVD system that costs $1000 less.
Rating: 5 / 5
#2 by T. Mason on July 2, 2010 - 10:04 pm
The headrests arrived about 3 days after I had placed the order. They were brand new in original packaging with no brand name of any kind on the factory box. They are well-made, sturdy and attractive. The metal posts have adjustable widths so that they would fit in a variety of seats. The instructions are very vague, but we installed them ourselves after finding out that a local car audio shop would charge $200 for professional installation. It only took us about 2 hours to install and that includes unhooking the car battery, and tucking all of the extra wires under the seats.
We removed the plastic backing off of the backs of our front seats in our Chrysler Town/Country minivan. We fed the long wires down through the seat backs and under the seat so that they came out from under the front of each seat. We removed the plastic cover off of the front console and wired both headrests into one of the power outlets in the console. Before touching any wires, we disconnected the negative terminal of the car battery. We wired the blue wire from the power outlet to both red wires from the headrests. Then we wired the black wire from the power outlet to both black wires from the headrests. We reattached the car battery and both DVD players were fully operational. We also hooked the a/v out cables from one headrest into the a/v in cables from the other headrest so that both kids can watch the same DVD. Even though there is no brand name anywhere on the headrest or unit, there is a part inside the DVD player that reads “Sony”. We are very pleased with the high quality picture and overall product.
Rating: 5 / 5
#3 by Film Buff on July 3, 2010 - 12:10 am
After reading everyone’s reviews, my wife and I decided to buy this unit — what a mistake! After less than three months of only occasional use, one unit has stopped working entirely. We used it less than 30 minutes a day 4 or 5 days a week. That’s it! And there were no small fingers touching it because our son is only one year old and too small to reach the DVD player. Because one unit broke, we turned on the second one, which had not been used since it was installed, only to find that It didn’t work either. And did I mention it’s never been used? What an absolute piece of garbage. And although we were aware that there was no warrantee on this product, our previous experience with Amazon sellers have always led to some sort of agreeable settlement with faulty merchandise. Not so with this seller, EliteAutoSoundSales. After informing them that we had obviously received a lemon, we received a curt email back from them saying it’s been over 30 days and the return period has expired. Don’t buy this product — especially from this horrible seller. Now that I look back on the other reviews, I see that most of them focus on how easy it is to use and how it looks good — but very few of them comment on the longterm quality of the player itself. I was fooled — but please do not make the same mistake I did!
Rating: 1 / 5
#4 by Joseph Wood on July 3, 2010 - 12:13 am
Installation was actually easier than I thought. There are a couple of YouTube videos that go over the steps for a generic player (no this one) – but the theory is the same. The two big issues are getting access to the cables inside the seat (access under your seat covers) and wiring up the power.
The seat cover access was quite easy, once I worked out how to do it without damaging the seat. The power was more difficult. Instead I decided to hook it up to a generic cig lighter with some tape. The cables are very long, so a few cable ties came in handy to tidy things up.
The quality of the players is very good. We’ve had a number of external portable car players, and all of them have broken or failed to play disks. These players are far better and all disks play fine. They are already region free, so they play our collection of region 2 disks out of the box.
The only issues so far…
These are Chinese players. The manual in the box is written in very poor English. This leads to a bit of trial and error to get things to work. The on-screen menus are pretty good, so this is not really a problem.
The supplied earphones are very good, but are based on IR transmission. These suffer from some reception problems and some background noise. It looks like they have the capability to be wired, but I haven’t tried it yet.
The other problem is the support for SD Cards. Firstly, these players do not support SDHC, so the cards are limited to 2GB. There is a USB option, so a thumb drive can be used at a larger capacity. It’s also not clear which video codecs are supported. MP4 H.264 at 240 lines does not seem to work, this need further experimentation. If I work it out I will post an update.
Rating: 4 / 5
#5 by A. Chintis on July 3, 2010 - 2:20 am
Seems like you get a lot with this package. However, when you start taking into account some of them don’t work, or work properly, it really boils down to very little. We’ve had this set for over 6 months now. First, the setup is not for an amateur. You either need to have this professionally installed, or know a lot about wiring yourself. We did it ourselves, and although we thought we knew plenty, there really is no way to do it yourself in a professional-looking way. It doesn’t say this outright in the description, but you cannot just plug this in to your car’s lighter plug and be ready to go. You have to wire it yourself into the car’s electrical system. Pain in the butt. And to hook the two components together so that you have the functionality it brags about of sharing one DVD with the other screen? NOT user friendly at all.
Second, DVD menus are inaccessible for the most part. You just have to pop the DVD in and it plays what it wants. It will pick up where it left off when you start up again, but sometimes it just won’t play at all anymore and the only fix is to take out the DVD and play another one. Then MAYBE your original one will work again, when it feels like it. It is very unpredictable. One of our DVD movies will only play the bonus features and not the movie. And again, no title menu to access to fix it. Very odd.
Third, the “wireless” game remotes don’t work at all. I mean, AT ALL. Just throw those in the garbage. And even the wired ones are pretty useless. It came with 4 and within a week we were down to one. They are cheap and break very easily.
So, as far as having a DVD system in the car with two separate players – it’s great. But keep in mind all the bells and whistles this promises are irrelevant. Would I buy it again? Maybe. Wish I could have spent less on it. Would I get excited about all the extras again? No way.
Rating: 3 / 5