We are quickly becomming a Great Wolf Lodge family… we’ve got several times over the last couple years, and I only forsee more going forward for the next 5-8 years or so. We also travel to see family every now and then and so when we do I’m in charge of kid’s entertainment… Normally we use a simple setup for each kid that basically consists of an old android phone with syncthing and VLC…
In my homelab I host an instance of tdarr which is a tool batch processing media files - say you have a folder of tv shows encoded in h.264 and you want to re-encode to h.265 for space savings - tdarr is a great tool. So what I do is configure a “library” in tdarr (basically a folder of media), and then I hand-select the tv shows or movies the kids might want for the trip into that folder. tdarr compresses the media quite a bit and then that folder is also the syncthing back-end so the compressed media is just automatically updated and synced to the phones when on our home network.
This has allowed me to put almost anything the girls might want onto hand-held devices that fit in their backpacks and will work without an internet connection!