DVD's just do not work for us on a boat. They take up much space, require a player and rot out quickly. And the TV/DVD combinations use a lot of power. We have one and it uses 8A DC.

We later bought a 19" TV in Panama for $100. It runs on both 120VAC and 12VDC and uses 1.5A on DC while powering the hard drive and playing a movie. It has a built-in media player that accommodates every file format we have thrown at it so far.

All our movies/TV shows are on a 2TB hard drive which stays plugged into the TV. When we want to watch something, we just turn on the TV, use the remote to choose what to watch and press play. The hard drive is backed up to another 2TB drive for redundancy and loaning to friends. 2TB drives cost less than $100. If you don't need that much space, then smaller hard drives are essentially free now (I just threw away a couple of good 320GB drives because nobody wanted them!).

If you cannot find a TV with a 12V option, don't fret the power too much. Most now do not come with bricks and do the conversion on-board instead. Just use a small 150-300W pocket inverter. These draw almost no extra power and do not lose much in efficiency. At most, you will use an extra 0.25A using one. I doubt it will even be this much.

Mark