6 Essential Gadgets to Pull Off a Theater-Quality Outdoor Movie Night

When the weather gets warmer, it’s natural to spend less time indoors. If you’re lucky enough to have a backyard, you can gather friends and family together to watch a movie or TV show outside of the house. That may sound like lugging a bunch of heavy equipment around, but it doesn’t have to be. In fact, it’s possible to set up and break down an outdoor home theater system in roughly half an hour with a little prep work.

If you want a true home theater experience, one that you can use both inside and outside of your home, it’ll take longer, but we’ve collected the essential gear and accessories you’ll need for an outdoor movie night without much fuss. Our goal was to enable you to watch movies and TV shows in HD at home, in your backyard, or anywhere else. As long as you’ve got an internet connection, you’ll be all set.

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1. Nebula Mars II Pro Projector

There’s only one gadget you need for an outdoor movie night: a projector. We’re recommending Nebula’s Mars II Pro because it can offer up a pretty good outdoor movie experience without any other accessories. It has a native resolution of 720P (HD), and maximum brightness of 500L (Lumins), so the videos you play will look clear at night.

The main reason we’re recommending the Mars II Pro is because it has a built-in battery, which the company says can last up to three hours per charge. That’s long enough for one movie, or a few episodes of a TV show. If you keep the projector connected to an outlet, you can watch videos for as long as you want.

The Mars II Pro also has a set of 10W speakers, which delivery pretty good sound (especially bass), and get very loud. If you’re hosting a lot of people, they’ll be able to hear both dialogue and special effects pretty well. The speakers are bunched together, though, so you won’t get a lot of stereo separation, or anything approximating surround sound.

Nebula outfitted this projector with one HDMI port, which allows you to connect virtually any device, from a media streamer to a game console, without any adapters. There’s also a headphone jack, so you can connect the Mars II Pro to better-sounding speakers, and a USB port, so you can play videos off of a flash drive. Finally, this projector runs Android 9.0, so you can access many popular streaming services (YouTube, Hulu, etc.) directly from the Mars II Pro itself.

The Mars II Pro was made to be movie theater on-the-go, and it performs really well in most circumstances. Cinephiles will want to upgrade to a 4K projector, and you may want to connect it to an external audio system, but it’s hard to argue with a one-and-done solution.

2. TaoTronics 100-Inch Projector Screen

You can project a movie onto any surface, but you’ll get the best results if you use a dedicated screen. This one from TaoTronics is made out of a wrinkle-free material, sits on a tripod, and is large enough to display a 100-inch image. The company says you can set it up in two minutes without any tools, and includes a storage bag to keep it safe when the screen is not in use.

2.  Edifier R1700BT Speakers

If you want to upgrade the sound of your outdoor movie night, your best bet is to get a pair of Edifier’s R1700BT powered speakers. They contain an amplifier, so you don’t need to connect them to a stereo receiver, but do need to be plugged into an outlet to work. The R1700BTs have two drivers (the part of a speaker that creates sound): a four-inch woofer to handle bass and midrange frequencies, and a .75-inch tweeter to handle treble.

Spreading frequencies between the two drivers results in better balanced sound. You can make little tweaks by twisting the bass and treble knobs on the left-hand side of the right speaker if you prefer.

You can connect the R1700BTs to your projector via a Y-Cable, which goes from the Mars Pro II’s headphone jack into one of its RCA (red and white) inputs. The speakers have an additional RCA input and Bluetooth support, so you can plug an additional home theater component, or stream music to them wirelessly. Edifier includes a remote with the R1700BTs, so you can adjust their volume and switch inputs on the fly if the video you’re watching gets too loud or soft.

Edifier’s R1700BTs are a great tech piece of audio gear for your outdoor movie night, indoor home theater, or computer.