I have an extremely similar setup for my 3yr old. He has his NFC cards and select from stuff we find suitable. The TV comes on, one episode runs, TV goes off.
He's not fighting over the remote and he has agency. And he's certainly not stumbling his way through YouTube on a tablet.
No ads. Very nice for him. It's not yet necessary to track his usage. But I'm well prepared for it.
Home Assistant works very well for these cases. I'm sad that Netflix&Co. do not publicize their urls/intents/etc. for smart TVs. I'd be happy to call an episode directly.
This setup therefore needs to run through my own media server and that's why I sometimes have to resort to pirate-y means, even though I have licenses to watch it.
> I'm sad that Netflix&Co. do not publicize their urls/intents/etc. for smart TVs. I'd be happy to call an episode directly.
I haven't really tried this myself, but this Stack Overflow question seems to have found a solution[0]. Since you're already using Home Assistant, you might want to check out the Google Cast integration[1] although Netflix doesn't currently seem to have a documented solution.
This is a really cool project, but also way beyond the skills of an average person.
I don’t know If I am becoming old fashioned, but I feel things were simpler when I was a kid, we had DVD player and we would come over to a friends house and watch a movie. We even found someone’s porn collection!
I feel this issue is endemic through all of society - you have to spend more and more of your IQ points figuring out basic shit, and eventually it’s gets too much and you have no IQ points left to figure out big questions in life
We went back to DVDs for my kid, actually. My wife and I really like the idea of a hard start and end to a video (with no chance for algorithmic tendrils to reach you) and we like the idea of having to put in some amount of effort to start the video. It's on demand, but not as on demand as scrolling through a streaming service is.
I can't quite articulate why this feels like an improvement to me. Maybe it's because I have experienced decision paralysis on streaming services so many times.
Tons of DVD collections being given away for almost nothing on FB marketplace right now, too.
Is it not expected for people (or generations) to learn new things (and not learn obsolete things)?
My kids learned how to navigate Apple TV and the Apple TV remote at age 3 to go to Infuse or PBS kids app. And I tell them to turn off the TV after x episode of y time limit, and they know how to do that.
How did you get Spotify to play? Are you using an official Spotify client? Casting Spotify via code/home assistant somehow? When I tried to do something similar (was trying to run a cron job to cast a particular playlist from Spotify to play on my chromecast audio/speakers every morning) maybe 8 years ago I couldn’t figure out how. Maybe it’s easier now?
So whenever the card is held to the reader a script starts and plays the media and shuts down the TV after the episode has run.
It's easy enough to measure the accumulated script runtime and disable the reader once a daily allowance has been reached. Though I am not a fan of an allowance like that.
Nevertheless, tracking the script runtime is easy enough. It's a family TV, but a private TV can easily be tracked via power consumption. Then you can track any usage and help managing consumption.
My kids (2,4yo) have one each. They were recommended by a friend who has one for their child. Honestly one of the best pieces of tech I've used in a while.
The app is thoughfully made with exactly the sort of features you'd want (alarms, separate volume limits for day/night, night light with changeable colours, morning alarm, bed/wake colours so the kids know when they should be asleep/awake; though my kids don't pay any attention to it, etc). Once you've scanned a card you own, you can activate it from your mobile app so when you're travelling you don't have to take all of the cards with you and risk losing them (though you do need to have WiFi for the Yoto to control it that way; I use my phone hotspot when we're places with no WiFi).
They also have a couple of radio stations, fun educational one which is different every day, like a radio station, and a music one, which switches to bedtime music after bed time and plays curated bedtime lullabies and the sort of things you'd expect for sleep music for children.
There's loads of educational cards (my 4yo loves the "adventures" series with "missy" where they explore different things about the world; under the sea, space, rainforests, etc), there's stories, and there's music, there's also a decent second-hand marketplace around here on Gumtree where people sell the cards their children have grown out of, though they do hold much of their value.
The ability to record your own cards is also a huge win; they give you (I believe) 500MB of storage for each card you buy (at ~£2 each), and you can record your own readings of things, or upload mp3s (we've made some Yoto music cards for CDs we own but they don't make cards for).
We take them with us when we travel, but intend to buy the Yoto Minis which are much more portable for that purpose.
I like that you can get other people (i.e. grandparents) to join your yoto "family" and have them record things via the app and it transfers to your card.
My daughter (almost 2) loves her Yoto and brings it everywhere. The NFC card to play music means she can (and has) put peanut butter in the card slot and it doesn't matter.
> Less directly was Tonies, an audio player for kids that uses NFC on Skyrim style figures to trigger stories.
My youngest, at 16, still loves the Tonie Box. She uploads random stuff to their web portal and plays it quietly at night. Her sister, in the top bunk, had a string / pulley connected to the figurine so that she could restart the music from her bed by lifting it just a little bit and putting it back down.
Amazing write up and work in general putting this together - this is such an ideal form of the word "hack" in its incredibly low cost, durability, and usefulness.
I was staggered when I saw your build cost list - I know ESPs are in the realm of "Cheap AF" but all of those NFC cards also for $9?! This is one of the few reasons I would shop Alibaba! We're talking around $15 total for the full NFC setup if you can print/rig yourself a case! (yes, of course, another $X for screens, sound etc)
I have run into such a crazy amount of cool hacky kid tech in the past couple of days for some reason (this and Makey Makey), and am so lucky to have done so. I can't wait to outfit my kids with this, it is going to blow their minds.
I want to hook it up to Jellyfish because I feel Plex is total marketing trash these days but as soon as I can get time I am all over this.
You can get loads of NFC tags as stickers extremely cheap. I think using the cards is better here just for durability but if you're willing to put in a bit more DIY and accept a slightly less durable final product you could print it on a heavy card stock and stick one of the innumerable NFC stickers to that then laminate.
The author himself pointed out in the end of the article that blurays are cheap- in my view they provide a close enough physical experience. I would probably stick with Blu-ray approach?
They leave the last disc laying on the TV cabinet. It never, ever goes back in the box. I found three stacked at one point, and I think one disc just outright disappeared and we had to get a new one. It wasn’t until the discs started skipping that the kids even thought about taking care of them.
Sooo many forum postings of parents lamented the loss of VHS when DVDs and Blu rays took over because of the kid factor. I saw a lot of people backing up their discs and giving their kids the duplicates because of the cost of (especially Disney) films. I also think slot-load (rare for disk players) is a lot more durable than tray-load for kids.
I for one don't own a blu-ray anymore and really don't want to - they feel to me like LaserDiscs or BetaMax at this point! :)
Plus, to fathom a three-year-old-destroyer-of-property handling your blu-ray disc collection, I shudder! They are great frisbees, and coasters, and etc.
If I even still owned blu-rays I might consider ripping them and then converting to this just to avoid the above mentioned pain.
The movies visible in the photos in the article, and their runtimes in minutes, are:
94 The Good Dinosaur
92 Trolls
98 Wall-E
88 The Lion King
103 Moana
81 Toy Story
91 Trolls World Tour
95 Inside Out
103 Frozen II
95 A Bug's Life
> We have two boys, and the eldest is permitted a 30-minute TV session in the morning and another in the evening.
So...if one of them wants to watch The Lion King or Toy Story they have to split it over at least 3 viewing sessions split over at least 2 days? And for anything else on that list they need to split it over at least 4 viewing sessions?
That seems overly restrictive. Yes, limiting kid's TV time is probably a good idea, but would it really hurt to have some flexibility so that they can finish a movie in one session? Maybe let them bank sessions, so they can say skip morning TV for 3 days, and apply that time to the 4th day's evening to get a slot for a whole movie.
Author here (surreal to see my post at the top of HN!)
My kids are 3 and 2, and they don't watch TV like adults. They watch a bit of movie, get up, walk around, do something else, come back, and watch a bit of another movie or even switch to a TV show. It's weird!
I like your idea about flexibility, but they're too young right now. Maybe we'll introduce your "bank" concept when they get older or increase the "TV budget". But for now we stick to 2x 30 minutes.
Indeed they are. I have a five year old who is now old enough to choose his own films and series from a selection curated by us. A system like this would be fine for children of his age.
But 2 and 3? They are too young to choose their own media at all. Not because they can't, but because they can't judge the impact. For toddlers you really want to be the one in control about what they watch (and that horrible Bing can die in a tragic bunny bonfire).
The Lion King, Wall-E? That's just overloading them at that age (and both are rated 6+ in the Netherlands). You can start with those at 5 or so depending on the child, or later if you've noticed them reacting too intensely to films rated 6+. For now? Stick with shorts suitable for their age, and move on to films (like Ghibli's Ponyo) at 4 or 5 as a special treat.
Autonomy is all fine and well, but screens have an enormous impact on developing children. This is a really cool project, but you might want to reflect on how their brains are developing and what you as a parent can do to guide them.
Well, the nice thing about having borders is that you can allow those borders to disappear every now and then. Feels like something special for the kid!
Plenty of parents do use screens responsibly. My five year old can watch one episode of whichever series he is watching at the moment after school (currently Hilda, which Netflix really should push harder than some of the crap that gets suggested). In the weekends sometimes we allow for one film instead.
It's not a challenge to keep a limit on screen time at this age.
My 4 year old naturally does this anyway, and I can imagine many kids do.
We don't have a set amount of allowed TV time for her, but she typically watches around 15-20 minutes of TV and then gets up and does something else.
The only real rule we have around it is that TV (unlike music) is not a background sound. If you're done watching something, you have to turn it off, not just let it play forever.
May depend on the kids' ages and what sort of viewer they are. As a young kid (like around age 6 and below) watching a movie episodically would've been fine for me. Time was different; I had no sense of a story arc spanning more than an hour.
> Between certain hours, we allow them to watch TV. They can watch any movie they like. They can even switch between movies. But the timeframe is fixed. They can watch a good chunk of one movie, or they can watch a tiny bit of 10 different movies. It's completely up to them.
> 1 hour of TV time PER DAY for small kids is considered restrictive?
In general, probably not. My point was that in the specific case of movies, where even movies designed for children usually run at least 80+ minutes, maybe an exception should be made so that the kid can watch the whole movie in one session if they want to and have the patience and attention span to do so.
You can still limit the average to an hour a day. They just have to mix shorter content with movies to keep the average down.
Breaking off movies after an hour is going to put the break around the act II low point in most children's movies. If the kid got invested in the characters and story that's a terrible place to make them stop until tomorrow.
Eh it'll probably be a reason for therapy when they're older, but the skill to say "okay, time for bed" and stop watching in the middle of something is an underrated skill.
This is so cool! I do something similar for music - I have posters up for albums, and a small NFC tag is embedded behind the poster, so tapping my phone to the poster’s corner and clicking the notification begins playing it immediately. I really want to make a collection of cassette-or-record-style plastic cards with album art and NFC tags, and hook it up to a speaker, so I can place my album on a pedestal and it starts playing immediately.
I do the same for my CDs. I have them ripped on Plexamp and I place the NFC tags inside a corner of the booklet. So I tap the phone to the corner of a CD case instead. But my plan is to build a device like OP's so I don't even need the phone.
I use "NFC Tools" to write the URL, which I copy the album/song URL from Spotify and embed it. When I hold my phone near it, the URL appears in the notifications, and clicking it opens it in Spotify, which then starts playing it. I have a bag of 100 tags I got from a friend so no shortage there.
I'd love to do something similar for myself, but having never worked with NFC I see there are tons of different options.
Would you mind mentioning what tags you got?
This feels like a new genre of hardware hacking to me, where someone is motivated to make a device out of compassion for their family or others. It reminds me of this instance where someone designed their own peristaltic pump to ensure their grandfather can eat:
I seem to recall another similar device to this posted on HN also, but with audiobooks.
On an unrelated note, the modern digital age does deprive me of my longtime love of removable media, whether analogue or digital. There's a mechanical satisfaction in having a physical token which is decisively inserted into something. USB drives just don't have the kinetic enjoyment of a floppy disk or tape. (Clearly the next iteration of the OP's design needs a motorised NFC card loader, ATM-style. ;))
This is great, I looked into doing something similar when my daughter was little. I didn't get very far and she learned how to use the remote control pretty quickly. I honestly think it was better for her to do it the 'old' way as she's pretty digitally savvy (for her age) than I would have expected.
I remember when I was little I figured out how to use the VHS to set timers record shows etc, I think making things difficult is useful, it forces some learning to get a 'reward'.
I agree, and ultimately think it's also learned behavior, and seeing those at home interested in technology and getting a deeper meaning about things.
A lot of comments seem to think that millenials or younger don't have an interest in technology, but I think that's only because they see their older peers or family members perfectly fine with a dumbed down interface to get their needs taken care of.
As a 45 year old, that got started with computers at 2 years old watching and playing around with games my dad would write on an Atari 800XE/XL system, my 13 year old son gets all of the touch interfaces, but also picked up a serious interest in tech from watching me. I didn't want to push him into software, wanting him to find his own way with his interests, but in the last year he has shown an interest in figuring out what is behind all those touch interfaces and websites that just do things "automatically."
I had taking apart crystal radios and learning to put multiple viruses on the family computer to have them fight for the "ultimate" virus as my learning experience. I think curiosity is learned, and even encouraging things outside of technology can lead into technology or science/math/problem solving. Younger generations are just as hungry for knowledge, we just have hidden it away, and need to give them a peek behind the scenes.
I built my kids "the box", which had a similar concept. It was an upholstered box with a frosted acrylic top and a camera mounted inside facing up. You would put cards on top of the box and it would recognize the symbols and take an action, like play a song or read a word. I used large printouts of Data Matrix, as I found that faster and most accurate to decode. The front (up-facing) side would have a colorful design.
In the most advanced version I had it read letters to read a word aloud (eg, a spelling tool). All so I could reenact the scene from Sneakers where they rearrange Scrabble tiles from SETEC ASTRONOMY to TOO MANY SECRETS :)
> I think making things difficult is useful, it forces some learning to get a 'reward'.
I found the same growing up. But at the time (the 90s) there weren't hyperstimuli available in the form of smartphones, streaming services, or engagement-optimized algorithmic content feeds. The broadcast television that was available was often boring, or at least poorly matched to any given person's interests at a given time. We didn't have a game console at home either, so getting a game to work meant installing it on the family computer, and maybe troubleshooting problems myself.
I don't know that I'd have learned as much as I did about computers at that age if such hyper-optimized things had been available to me as a kid. And I think their availability today proves that any notion of "digital natives" was a fallacy. The generation below me (Gen-Z, Zoomers?) seem to be experts at using touchscreen devices and social networks. Some of them are even flocking to text based AI games that seem intriguing. But they see computers largely as fixed appliances, and most give up pretty quickly when a computer malfunctions (whether it comes in the form of a phone, laptop, tablet, television, or something else).
I now deliberately work to banish (and keep banished) as much of that algorithmically optimized hyperreality as possible out of my home and life. I feel much better without it, and always have. But I also think it's a good practice to get used to so that, if I ever have kids, it'll be the norm I pass on to their daily lives. Your first computer should require some assembly and tinkering, and digital activities which are really just skinner boxes created as lures by some or other corporation shouldn't be available to compete with more difficult, more rewarding pursuits.
> The generation below me (Gen-Z, Zoomers?) seem to be experts at using touchscreen devices and social networks.
Pet theory: This perception is largely from their confidence in messing around until something works, which has only a loose connection to the operator's competence.
Younger generations have grown up with devices that are (A) more idiot-proofed and (B) cheaper and easier to replace and (C) less supervision when using it. This leads to a different way of approaching the problem, which may be more-effective but isn't necessarily more-knowledgeable.
In contrast, older generations who grew up with "never press these two buttons at the same time or it can explode" operate with an implicit assumption that those Kids These Days must know something their parents don't in order to mess around so casually.
> The generation below me (Gen-Z, Zoomers?) seem to be experts at using touchscreen devices and social networks.
And, importantly, it's not that they learned the new tech fluently while millennials haven't adapted—there aren't "modern" digital skills that aren't readily learned by millennials, but there certainly are fewer Gen Z adults who have learned to fluently use the still-more-powerful keyboard-based tech that we picked up as kids.
I unplugged the Alexa for about 6 months, that was a good reset, and we have a few tablets etc but no nonsense apps installed.
Although time is ticking and I be we'll soon have the influence from 'peer pressure' - we're getting our daughter prepped for secondary/high school next year so she's got an old iPhone to play around with but thankfully she has zero interest in tech as a distraction. She sends a message to her friends every now and then, she watches some tutorials on Youtube for the piano, and of course some cat videos. My bigger worry is that she is going to bankrupt me from books... she's reading a new one every other week and has a real attachment to them so I can't persuade her to go to the local library...
I had a programmable calculator, a 8-bit computer (with few games but with built-in basic, assembly, and a debugger), then a PC, all before easy internet access. These were hyperstimuli all right.
You can even do QR code reading via a web-page, and "add-to-homepage" if you wanted to put it onto an iPad.
Obviously the OP project is better thought out, but it's quite good to learn different bits and pieces and strategies about deep linking and internal media.
I actually set that system up and it was awesome! Really was cool and fun to have the little cards, look through them and then "tap" to start the album. Unfortunately I needed the Raspberry Pi for an emergency and then have never fot around to running again. I fear now, with all the SONOS fun (that has destroyed my 8 speaker setup :'( ), it won't work any more.
Thanks for sharing that! I built something similar but I was talking directly to Spotify and outputting through the RasPi. I had no idea Sonos provided an http api. I thought they were locked down. Maybe worth another go!
I made a similar system but for music, using QR codes on plastic cards and a webcam, when my daughter was 1. After a year or so we switched to just having a standalone numkey pad where she could just punch in numbers from a jukebox-style catalog. https://github.com/dmd/nkplay/
She's now 10, and knows ~100 playlists by number. "I want to listen to 37!"
Your numpad solution looks great! Would you have a photo of the whole setup? I thought about doing the same, but I fear to end with cables and PCB everywhere in my children's room if I take this path :)
There's honestly nothing really to see. It's a raspberry pi in a standard plastic case[0] with 3 cables coming out of it - power, usb to the numkey, and audio (male to male headphone jack) to the speakers.
The pi and power are hidden behind a bookshelf, so all that is actually visible is the numkey and the speaker.
We realised that even a lot less cool than nfc, just put an inexpensive blueray reader + disc movies next to the tv and no internet connection was the best option for us.
This! We also discovered out teeny tiny local library has a movie section. Each time I feel like a kid in a video store from the 90’s!
You can even book a title on their webapp and pick it up when available, it really feels great.
Having offline and finite media consumption feels much more satisfying than the modern endless scrolling IMHO.
for anyone that's a retro gamer that plays roms / emulators etc.. there's a great project with tons of great artists making prints called TapTo. Most of the setups are with a Mister FPGA setup, but it works with pretty much any setup with a bit of tweaks. I really dig the idea and may integrate one into an arcade cabinet in the office.
I have a similar setup but I've been using chip cards and a card reader. I find it much more intuitive than just placing an NFC card over a reader. The card reader blinks when a card is inserted, changes colour, it's all very obvious and physical, with immediate feedback.
In my case I only use it with music though (I deem them still too small to choose movies themselves).
I've been using reclaimed chip cards (various bank cards mostly) which all have an easy to read kind of ID, but I haven't been able to find a way to write things to blank cards as easy as one can do with NFC cards though.
This is an awesome example of the kind of innovation which overlong copyright prevents.
There’s no particularly good reason that it should be legally impermissible for someone to build and sell a system like this loaded with movies from before, say, 2010 (or 2000, or whatever), but instead what the prospective entrepreneur would be legally able to include would be … Steamboat Willie, and other films of that vintage (as an aside, while Disney’s had a pretty rough couple of years, I’m pretty sure that Steamboat Willie being out of copyright has nothing to do with any of that).
This sort of experience shouldn’t be limited to children of high-tech folks with access to 3D printers: it should be possible for any child — or adult!
Keep an eye on the financials of the streaming services; at the moment few are profitable, and they will increase their prices and/or decrease their spending on new productions.
If there's a business case to be made, companies like Netflix might release a physical product for this... but I doubt they would, because of the investment and time required vs the revenue. Spotify tried something with an in-car device, but they cancelled and recalled the product pretty quickly.
Streaming services rely on volume; for them, hardware just isn't worth it.
If not for excessively long copyrights, streaming might not have taken off in the same way. You could instead buy e.g. $250 HDD that's loaded with 2,000 movies from 20+ years ago or whatever. A company could sell a NAS-like appliance that's designed to slot in drives that are pre-loaded with tons of media along with a card library like this to play them. Since they'd be out of copyright, there's no need for DRM and HDCP and all that, so the system might actually work without tons of fiddling. You wouldn't need high-paid techies to maintain a gargantuan delivery platform; you just clone drives at manufacturing time and ship them.
There's definitely a business case to be made with this if it were legal. There's sketchy Chinese pre-built mini PCs with emulators + 50k-100k ROMS that you can buy for ~$100 on Amazon right now, so basically following this exact business model. I'm actually surprised that there aren't similar products for movies (from what I can tell anyway).
Cool use of NFC tags! I remember seeing a similar idea with album art covering the walls, and you could hold your phone up to read an NFC tag hidden on the back to stream that album on the stereo.
Seconded. The Yoto is great. It also supports arbitrary MP3 assignment to their NFC cards. It’s all proprietary but has been rock solid over multiple years.
Soon, your sons will learn how to hack into this system, bypass your time limits, use the NFC cards you provided to play other cartoons, or convert your NFC reader into a room door lock.
I discovered how cheap NFC tags and readers were a few years ago and now I have completed several hobby projects based on that concept.
When we buy books for our younger nieces and nephews we buy companion stuffed animals and then sew an NFC tag (the small quarter size ones) into them with the YouTube read-along url encoded on it.
Really cool! I want this for my own vinyl so I can physically flip through my collection (with nfc tags stuck on) then place my sleeve of choice on a stand (with embedded nfc reader) to listen to the “vinyl” without having to touch a computer. That would be amazing and you’ve just proved it’s totally doable.
Love seeing fun ideas for NFCs, I went into a bit of a dive on NFC/RFID tech a while back after hearing about the game Dropmix (which used really cool tech I haven't seen anywhere else) and it feels like there could be so much room for fun tactile experiences with some of the protocols.
I was just talking with my wife that that we wish there was a streaming service that made the choices more intentional and limited. Like for each show there should only be one episode available a day. This is definitely in the same spirit. Love the idea and implementation!
It is not as simple as some other service already set up but you might look into ErsatzTV which attempts to make streaming more like old school TV channels where you watch whatever is on at 8:30am instead of picking like at a buffet.
So you could set it up so that Bluey is only on at 3pm for 30 minutes a day, or whatever.
I've thought about setting it up for my kids (and wife) but haven't done it yet.
Looks great.
I am working on side to learn product design by working on a similar system for music. The idea is to have the tactile feel of a vinyl like system but with the features of a digital library and ecosystem.
The base implementation was really straightforward and hardly a few hours but to make it bridge the gap we see with our digital tools emulating analog ones is quite fun to work on. From the latency involved between placing the card to the output from a remote service, the sound dial's latency when paired with bluetooth speakers all take one away from the experience.
It's also fun to learn little leathercrafting and concrete moulding for the prototype design.
This is incredible! I want to replicate this at home as well, but I would prefer to use QR codes since they also support URLs. Any reason why you went with NFC instead of QR code? I assume it's doable with a raspberry pi and webcam instead of tapping?
My thought process was to laminate them to make them easier to make at home. I agree that it’s definitely more child friendly. This maybe a project I attempt at home and will post if I’m successful.
I was surprised that you opted to use the tag ID as a primary key instead of writing the relevant metadata to the NFC tags in the first place. NTAG215s have about 500 bytes worth of rewritable storage, so you could even embed the full deep links if you so desired.
It's probably easier to embed an NFC tag in something child-friendly, compared to printing QR codes on something that small kids won't destroy.
Also in this case (since it just laminated cards anyway) the usability is much easier. The kid just has to touch something. While with a QR it has to be positioned in a way that a camera can see and focus to it.
I like the idea of restricting the time time frame duration of watching movies. I would suggest adding a electric zapper to the couch that when they try to watch movies past a certain time they get zapped at a certain voltage eliciting a negative response.
Do you have boys? I guarantee you all mine would do is run out the clock and then he and his friend would try to push each other’s faces into the electrodes.
Loved reading that and realising that the author has hit on something. I do wonder though, who was looking after the house and kids whilst the author spent all the time researching and building!
Same here! I have debated making something similar for my personal music collection. I used to meticulously organize my albums in iTunes and listen to them in full. Somehow I stopped doing that with Spotify. The magic of the album is gone for me.
This is a cool and nerdy project, and I support that.
From a functional perspective would it not be simpler to simply
burn dvd / blu-rays and if they are old enough use that system?
(Given that kids are not exactly careful with physical media
burning copies takes away the worry)
I dont get a feel for how many movies you have printed cards for,
but it doesn't look that many.
Something like a Streamdeck with buttons for each movie could work
but then you do lose part of the physical media feeling.
I've been buying CDs as well as burning FLAC albums I have on blanks for basically this same reason, the limited choices and slightly higher switching costs is more enjoyable to me. And CDs still cost about as much as they ever did, which means they're much cheaper now with inflation.
I found vinyl CD labels [1] that I can print on my color laser printer that look pretty decent, it only takes a few minutes to burn the CD, find an image of a retail disc and put it in the label's Canva template.
My car is a 2017 and it still has a CD player, and I also found a fairly inexpensive portable player [2] that charges with USB-C, the anti-skip is pretty impressive now. I can put it in my pocket and walk around or clean the house and I've never had it skip, it will actually spin down the disc when it's read far enough ahead.
If you want a really impressive portable optical disc format, consider looking into MiniDisc!
The players are even more impressive (I have one that plays something like 20 hours on a single AA battery), you can re-record the disks via USB using a WebUSB based webapp [1] these days for NetMD recorders, and the disks actually are almost infinitely re-recordable and much more stable than CD-Rs (which are write-once and only last a couple of years).
I also evaluated Plex but ended up with Infuse as it seemed perfect for my needs. The Apple TV app is great. Plex probably has more features though. I renew it once a year.
Wow, thanks for sharing this! I used to pay for Infuse as well, but switched to Plex for the deep linking. Might go back to Infuse because the Plex app occasionally freezes at startup.
I build something very similar, but for playing music/audio books in my kids rooms. But this is not why I am commenting: I found "HERMA 5028 Universal" stickers to be a very good fit for rfid/nfc cards; I don't know if they're available where you live, but here in germany they're a great solution for labeling cards.
PS: I will also publish my solution once I rewrite a few parts of it (cleanup).
I'd be super interested in your writeup, I'd like to build a homemade Tonie for my kids as well. Any way you could contact me when you're finished or do you have a blog I could regularly check out?
The Apple TV also supports deep links for other services. Here are examples for the biggest streaming services:
Netflix (use the regular URL):
https://www.netflix.com/title/80234304
Disney+ (use regular URL):
https://www.disneyplus.com/movies/coco/db9orsI5O4gC
YouTube (use the regular URL with https:// replaced by youtube://)
Single video: youtube://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ah3ezprtgmc
Playlist: youtube://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v=FkUn86bH34M&list=PLzvRQMJ9HDiQF_5bEErheiAawrJ-2zQoI&pp=iAQB
The only problem with these services is that they will require you to select a profile before the movie/show will start playing. With Plex, you can enable "auto login", but I haven't tried it for the other services.
Nice idea, and great implementation.
And I really resonate with the "physical media is great" mantra. That's why I still buy a lot of DVDs of the movies I or my kids like. Last winter we had a two day internet outage, and all of the neighbors came to me for lending DVDs :D
That experience reinforced my believe in physical media more than ever!
I love this. I dislike the half hour brackets. Love how the OP frequently talks about his childhood and being able to pick movies - he didn't half a timer going that determined when the movie ended, the movie did.
Kids movies are like an hour long. How are kids ever going to develop any sort of an attention span if they never see the ending of things
This is a very cool project, and I like the nostalgic feel of it! However, this project got me thinking:
We are on a forum filled with people working on these super addicting infinite scroll technologies at YouTube, Instagram, maybe even TikTok. At the same time though, this post removing all these addictive technologies has reached the #1 spot on HN (and HN is deliberately made without any of this addicting tech!!)
I think it is time for people to really realize how addicting the tech they are making is, without masking it with words like 'friction' and 'engagement'. And hopefully they will slowly work on making their tech a little bit less addictive.
Before Covid we had some kind of movement like this, but it has sadly dwindled.
i found the “thanks to Hans Wurst” part funny: it is a common way to stay anonym while inputting a real sounding name, like John Doe, but nobody really has this name
Simpler than this is just switching to DVDs. Not only do I not have extra bandwidth strain on my home internet, but there are no recurring fees, no worries about legality, and lots of extra features and games that kids enjoy. DVDs are Blu Ray are the best format for movies that currently exist, and arguably the best way to actually own a movie legally. A good TV antenna serves for watching news in my area.
As a consumer, I try follow the reverse of William Painter's advice to King Camp Gillette before he invented the famous razor, "invent something people use and throw away" and arrive at "buy things you can actually own and use repeatedly."
This is really cool and demonstrates the power of stuff like home assistant really well.
I’ve recently rediscovered my old music collection from the pre-streaming days on an old NAS, thousands of mp3s with carefully curated id3 tags etc. I’m almost tempted to create a similar system but for albums!
This is great. And not just for kids. I think I'll copy the idea for my music and film collection. Picking up something and tapping somewhere feels like a nicer experience than navigating menus. I wish my e-reader had an NFC reader to do something similar with my books.
Man, this is such a fun project. I understand where you are coming from. You can do this with music too. There a lot of children audio books or songs where you have the same “issue” that a parent has to operate YouTube or Spotify.
There's a commercial equivalent we use for audio-only stories called Yoto - really high quality. Same level of agency, but less screen time. Good for bedtimes, but the kids also carry the thing round the house to listen to.
I love this! The constraints it applies to selection + the tangible interaction gives children a sense of definitive knowledge and expectation.l and agency. Which are very good for development. Congrats, I love it!
This technology could be used to benefit people with developmental disabilities like Alzheimer’s disease. TVs and streaming services have become increasingly complex compared to 30 years ago and it makes it harder for people who have cognitive issues. Wish I had something like this for my mom, who struggles to change channels on our UI heavy smart TV.
This is so cool. I’ve struggled with getting my media setup to work with any automations to call into the Roku and link to any app, let alone app content.
Really awesome project. This bit made me think though:
> First: you have a limited choice of movies to watch. When I was a kid, we didn't have an infinite catalog of movies to watch.
Something always rubs me the wrong way with this way of thinking. "X is good because I had X when I was young." I don't necessarily disagree that X is good, but it's definitely not because you had it as a kid.
You make a good point. The "it was better in my day" argument isn't always valid. I didn't mean to imply that something is inherently good just because it existed in the past.
But I do believe that having a smaller collection is nicer. It leads to a deeper appreciation for what you have. Each item in your library feels more special and valuable. And getting something new becomes exciting (I still remember getting a copy of The Lion King on VHS). This isn't something I get from browsing Netflix because new stuff is constantly being added.
As a bonus, it also helps with decision paralysis, which young kids are more susceptible to. At least that's my experience. Give them lots of toys and they'll play with none. Keeping the toy selection limited and rotating them is better (at least for my kids).
Thank you for letting me reflect on this! I will rephrase the post.
I had the same reaction. There are many reasons why I also believe OP's solution is better than the usual having a kid use the remote to navigate Disney+.
Having a curated selection instead of a near infinite catalog full of noise is one of them. Not exposing the kids to a UX optimised for retention (a.k.a. addiction) would be my main motivation though.
Because I had that as a kid, would be at the bottom of the list.
I was quite surprised of the printing quality as well.
Never had it clog up. But I have all kinds of issues with that printer. Always connects to the network but randomly refuses to print. Sometimes it only prints half a page. Sometimes it prints half a page and retries by itself. Scanning is pretty much impossible on macOS because the drivers aren't maintained. etc...
It's horrible. But when it prints, the quality is good...
Honestly, I get cold sweats from the thought of having to print something.
I love this and I've thought about making something similar just for myself, because I miss fucking around with DVD cases, but I also don't want to own a large library of DVDs and blurays that takes up too much space.
It's funny to think that 20 years ago at an IBM austin office there was a demo of a similar thing (early 2000s) - before streaming was a thing yet, before YouTube, where Home Theatre PCs were around but more of a homebrew niche.
We bought an off-the-shelf product like this (though, audio only) for our toddler. "Yoto Player." She can self-serve some stories or songs using cards to select a collection and it works great.
I'm not going to knock the idea down because that's how I grew up but, depending on your setup, buying a Blu-ray player means you have to hook it up (do you have enough inputs? Enough room? Do you need an extension cord?), choose the right source every time ("no, you're in HDMI1, you need S-Video"), have a second remote ("Have you seen the remote? No, the other one"), figure out why the box is empty (perhaps the disc is under the couch? And why does it have marmelade on it?), etc.
Maybe there's a plus to solutions like those where you learn how things work because you need to get them all to collaborate. But that's a different discussion.
Do you have children aged 0-4? My daughter had a CD player before we got the kids a Yoto each, and she and her little brother scratched the heck out of the CDs, not intentionally, but you just can't expect a child that age to handle them carefully enough not to scratch them.
I know Blu-Rays can take a bit more than a CD, but even they won't stand up to a 2yo.
Edit: seem the author himself sort of agrees. He buys Blu-Rays and puts them on the Plex. Could just skip the Plex part and let them play the Blu-Rays...
My kids were very a bit too reckless with the DVDs - thrown all over the living room and some got scratched and/or soiled to the point they couldn’t be played and the dvd tray took some rough handling as well.
Somewhat related: I wanted to track watch time, and perhaps set a time limit with Plex and HomeAssistant. Has anyone come up with a solution I can cheat off of?
Or you store them away because once you've ripped them, you no longer need access to the physical item. So there's no point on having them using up the valuable space of the living room.
I did something similar for my granny back when she was alive but no longer able to operate her CD player. http://dusted.dk/pages/easyplayer/
The fact that so many people come up with these kinds of solutions POST betamax begs questions. There seems to be some inherent unfairness in how unaccessible stuff is becoming..
It's interesting how we're trading the convenience (of signing up and paying montly for a dozen of rental services) for usability and tangibility..
Late Gen X rant incoming: WHEN I WAS A KID.. When I was 3 years old, I could put on the music I wanted to listen to.. It was easy, take the tape out of the case, put it into my cassette radio (if it didn't fit, try flipping it), and press the triangle.. poof, music.. I didn't need to be able to read, there were pictures on the tapes, so I could still find my favourite tunes.. When we got our first video machine, a betamax, it was the same thing, just put the tape into the machine, press the triangle, poof, the movie I had chosen played on the TV..
Then came DVDs, I was older then, so it was no problem for me, but, usability wise, DVDs were a step backwards.. You pop it in and press the tr.. No, you're met with unskippable copyright disclaimers and then presented with an animated menu, where you needed to be able to read to understand how to start the movie, suddenly, the movie itself contained (non standardized) ways of starting it, selecting chapters and such.. Sure, we traded the amazing ability to look at deleted scenes for the ability of of a small child to be able to start it.. but honestly, not even worth it..
Skip to online streaming services and their crappy apps.. Jesus.. Disney is how big of a company and their app is nearly unusable compared to a stack of VHS tapes..
We're putting untold layers of unneeded complexity on EVERYTHING these days, and I'm not even sure we do it because we can, I'm afraid we're doing it because we don't know how not to..
The early VCRs, cassette players and CD players were simple due to technological and economical constraints, but those constraints forced an extremely intuitive mode of operation which was transferable between similar devices.
We're leaving a world polluted, drowned in untold complexity at all levels for our children, and honestly, we can't even navigate it very well ourselves, even if we have most of the story about how things got to be that way in the back of our heads. Stuff that we understand deeply already seems like complete magic to the younger generations.. We ought to do better, to builder simpler and more BASIC systems at every level, from instruction set architecture through to UI..
The fact people find it reasonable that you almost have to use a "tech stack" is abysmal.. There shouldn't HAVE to be really much of anything between your code and the metal it runs on.
All that aside, this is a great idea! I'm going to do something simiar for my kid I think.
I find so much of modern technology to be a huge step backwards.
Example: People used to call friends over a land line and tell them to tune into the movie on whatever channel and they’d watch at the same time together from two different places. Doing anything like that with modern tech is such a hassle these days that no one does it anymore.
> And finally, if you're a non-English speaker, Blu-rays will include a dubbed version in your native language. This is a big plus for the kids, especially when they're as young as mine are now.
I grew up in a country where English is not the primary language spoken and when I was young all the cool shows and movies were in English. As a kid this was a huge incentive and went far above and beyond any education I had in English in my home country. I can’t overstate how valuable this has been to me as an immigrant to an English speaking country.
When I was 14-18 I watched anime (japanese dubs with eng subs). The censorship of the german dubs got me into it and I hated german subs plus the english subs were faster and the germans often were double translated (jap > eng > ger).
My english grades were very good thanks to it. Now I'm exposed more to english (movies, shows, internet, os) than german I've switched to german subs and started watching anime again 20 years later.
I keep fucking up numbers as german numbers are one-hundred-five-and-fifty instead of one-hundred-fifty-five and too many of my thoughts are in english.
There is a small movement trying to make both acceptable
> German numbers are one-hundred-five-and-fifty instead of one-hundred-fifty-five and too many of my thoughts are in english
Both are fine in the UK, though the "five-and-fifty" form is somewhat old fashioned. My Grandmother used to say numbers like that, especially for time. I refer you also to "Sing a Song of Sixpence"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sing_a_Song_of_Sixpence
Maybe this one of those sites that don't let you view them from outside their intended region, but I'd use 403 for that, so I assume it just got hugged
Funny side note google translate maims that large first line translating it (correctly but also incorrectly) as "Also twenty-one and not just twenty-one!". Just a funny note where the translation is content correct but not context correct.
Would you have recommendations for an English speaker trying to learn German? Where do I go to find anime with good German subtitles? Or, maybe even a German dub?
Yeah my native language is afrikaans which also has the 4 and 20 for 24 vibe. For me the difficulty is was with times tables strangely enough, as long after I started thinking primarily in English I was still doing times tables in afrikaans
The author is apparently a Dutch speaker, and English fluency really isn't a problem in Flanders or the Netherlands.
I think the language is close enough to English that it's easily picked up even watching only dubbed movies as a kid. In contrast friends of mine who mostly watched French-dubbed movies when they were small (because they were close to the border and Club Dorothée was better than whatever was available here) didn't learn much French, but they're fluent in English today (and that's with mandatory French lessons at school, much earlier than English lessons).
So English-version of movies is really unnecessary for kids here IMO. In my family we only watch French or Dutch (dubbed or original) movies with the kids and I think that's fine.
As a French-speaking Belgian living in the Dutch speaking part, in my experience and opinion, it's the opposite. Most French speaking folks can't speak a word of English because everything is dubbed, they are never exposed to the language. Meanwhile, there's no Dutch dubbing (because there's not enough Dutch speaking audience to justify the cost) and they all have fantastic English skills.
As a 70's/80's kid, there wasn't much dutch language kids-tv, but there was a lot of english language kids-tv (mostly british). And I think I learned most of my english from saturday morning cartoons. English in school came later.
Shame it doesn't work that well for learning japanese, because I do still watch a lot of anime (subbed), but still only know a handful of japanese words.
I have this general feeling based my 21 years bouncing around Europe that subtitle countries have better English than dub countries, although I'm not proposing that the link is causative
It's definitely a contributing factor. Living in the Netherlands, Dutch kids learn English through Youtube and Tiktok. Since it's a small country there's less Dutch spoken online, as opposed to German which has dubs for a lot of movies / TV shows.
My perception from traveling to 40+ countries is that countries where dubbing is common do so for the reason that the population is more illiterate and lower-educated in general, and that trend just extends to having less fluency in other languages.
As an American that only knew English, Japanese media that was only available without English was my #1 motivation to learn more Japanese. By the time I was low-intermediate, basically everything was fan-subbed day 1, and it killed a lot of my motivation. There were still light novels, but the ones I really want to read are still quite a bit above me, and I have barely progressed since then.
And we're on the verge of AI being able to translate everything in basically real time, spoken or written.
I agree with your estimation of the value of media you want that's not available in your language, in regards to language learning. I'm a little sad that that motivation won't exist for many people in the future, but also happy that they can just enjoy the content.
It's interesting to me that in spite of everything you point out, demand for learning English (and other languages to a lesser effect) as a Second Language seems higher than ever.
for me it was computer games, specifically Civ 2. Imagine playing that as a second-grader with zero English. But I had strong motivation, and ploughed through the game, dictionary in hand.
Same here. Either the original Japanese release, or the English fandubbed JRPG release for emulators. The choice was clear there; and my English skills skyrocketted with Chrono Trigger.
At least you had graphics. Zork I did it for me, I still remember my first word: "forest". Never could figure out wtf a "stiletto" is though, it wasn't in the ancient dictionary I had at the time.
I've found that most streaming services tend to have a good collection of subtitles and audio in various languages as well although I haven't compared that to physical media.
I have an extremely similar setup for my 3yr old. He has his NFC cards and select from stuff we find suitable. The TV comes on, one episode runs, TV goes off.
He's not fighting over the remote and he has agency. And he's certainly not stumbling his way through YouTube on a tablet. No ads. Very nice for him. It's not yet necessary to track his usage. But I'm well prepared for it.
Home Assistant works very well for these cases. I'm sad that Netflix&Co. do not publicize their urls/intents/etc. for smart TVs. I'd be happy to call an episode directly.
This setup therefore needs to run through my own media server and that's why I sometimes have to resort to pirate-y means, even though I have licenses to watch it.
> I'm sad that Netflix&Co. do not publicize their urls/intents/etc. for smart TVs. I'd be happy to call an episode directly.
That is an intentional marketing move. If you bypass the loading screen, you're also bypassing advertising for their content.
It's in Netflix's interest for you to be aware of their new releases or suggestions. They want you to see the loading screen.
The last thing they want is for you to start thinking that paying them is no longer worth the value.
> I'm sad that Netflix&Co. do not publicize their urls/intents/etc. for smart TVs. I'd be happy to call an episode directly.
I haven't really tried this myself, but this Stack Overflow question seems to have found a solution[0]. Since you're already using Home Assistant, you might want to check out the Google Cast integration[1] although Netflix doesn't currently seem to have a documented solution.
[0] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/18217559/launching-andro...
[1] https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/cast/
This is a really cool project, but also way beyond the skills of an average person.
I don’t know If I am becoming old fashioned, but I feel things were simpler when I was a kid, we had DVD player and we would come over to a friends house and watch a movie. We even found someone’s porn collection!
I feel this issue is endemic through all of society - you have to spend more and more of your IQ points figuring out basic shit, and eventually it’s gets too much and you have no IQ points left to figure out big questions in life
We went back to DVDs for my kid, actually. My wife and I really like the idea of a hard start and end to a video (with no chance for algorithmic tendrils to reach you) and we like the idea of having to put in some amount of effort to start the video. It's on demand, but not as on demand as scrolling through a streaming service is.
I can't quite articulate why this feels like an improvement to me. Maybe it's because I have experienced decision paralysis on streaming services so many times.
Tons of DVD collections being given away for almost nothing on FB marketplace right now, too.
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Is it not expected for people (or generations) to learn new things (and not learn obsolete things)?
My kids learned how to navigate Apple TV and the Apple TV remote at age 3 to go to Infuse or PBS kids app. And I tell them to turn off the TV after x episode of y time limit, and they know how to do that.
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> you have to spend more and more of your IQ points figuring out basic shit
I'm not sure that watching a movie on a streaming service requires more IQ points than watching it on a DVD.
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I, too, built almost the same thing for my kids. It plays music, using Spotify, Chromecast, and a whole lot of virtual duct-tape via HomeAssistant.
There is also an NFC tag that will turn off all the lights and turn on a disco ball :-).
Emergency Party Button strikes again! https://youtu.be/nZIfIzNW9xM
How did you get Spotify to play? Are you using an official Spotify client? Casting Spotify via code/home assistant somehow? When I tried to do something similar (was trying to run a cron job to cast a particular playlist from Spotify to play on my chromecast audio/speakers every morning) maybe 8 years ago I couldn’t figure out how. Maybe it’s easier now?
I am slowly preparing myself, but the usage tracking made me wonder. What are you planning to do?
So whenever the card is held to the reader a script starts and plays the media and shuts down the TV after the episode has run.
It's easy enough to measure the accumulated script runtime and disable the reader once a daily allowance has been reached. Though I am not a fan of an allowance like that.
Nevertheless, tracking the script runtime is easy enough. It's a family TV, but a private TV can easily be tracked via power consumption. Then you can track any usage and help managing consumption.
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> The TV comes on, one episode runs, TV goes off.
I'm curious how you track that? I don't have HA connected to plex yet, but I will. I suppose there might be an event when the 'track' changes?
I play the single media file. Once the player is in "idle" or "stopped" instead of "playing" or "paused" the TV is turned off.
Is there a product opportunity here? What are the risks?
Licensing.
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Awesome.
Reminded me of Yoto, an internet radio style thing for kids that uses little NFC cards.
https://us.yotoplay.com/
Techmoan reviewed it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2mQECKOkkqk
Less directly was Tonies, an audio player for kids that uses NFC on Skyrim style figures to trigger stories.
https://us.tonies.com/
Techmoan did a video on that too (it’s how I know about both): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P9RbMMJRxzw
If you are looking for a FOSS alternative to tonies, yoto and such I would also recommend the DIY TonUINO project.
The boards are built into boxes, toys (from fire engines to plush) and whatever sparks imagination. https://discourse.voss.earth/t/tonuino-gehaeuse-galerie/786/...
Most of the community speaks German, but there is also an English section https://discourse.voss.earth/c/international/11
The source code is in English and the schematics language independent. https://github.com/tonuino/TonUINO-TNG
There is also the similar Phoniebox community which is using Rasperry Pis: https://phoniebox.de/
Here is my build that fits into a wooden police bus. The figures put on the driver seat start the music: https://github.com/Bronkoknorb/hermibox
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My kids (2,4yo) have one each. They were recommended by a friend who has one for their child. Honestly one of the best pieces of tech I've used in a while.
The app is thoughfully made with exactly the sort of features you'd want (alarms, separate volume limits for day/night, night light with changeable colours, morning alarm, bed/wake colours so the kids know when they should be asleep/awake; though my kids don't pay any attention to it, etc). Once you've scanned a card you own, you can activate it from your mobile app so when you're travelling you don't have to take all of the cards with you and risk losing them (though you do need to have WiFi for the Yoto to control it that way; I use my phone hotspot when we're places with no WiFi).
They also have a couple of radio stations, fun educational one which is different every day, like a radio station, and a music one, which switches to bedtime music after bed time and plays curated bedtime lullabies and the sort of things you'd expect for sleep music for children.
There's loads of educational cards (my 4yo loves the "adventures" series with "missy" where they explore different things about the world; under the sea, space, rainforests, etc), there's stories, and there's music, there's also a decent second-hand marketplace around here on Gumtree where people sell the cards their children have grown out of, though they do hold much of their value.
The ability to record your own cards is also a huge win; they give you (I believe) 500MB of storage for each card you buy (at ~£2 each), and you can record your own readings of things, or upload mp3s (we've made some Yoto music cards for CDs we own but they don't make cards for).
We take them with us when we travel, but intend to buy the Yoto Minis which are much more portable for that purpose.
I like that you can get other people (i.e. grandparents) to join your yoto "family" and have them record things via the app and it transfers to your card.
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There is also this 37C3 Talk about Tonies https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DNufX-tss5M
Also a big fan of Yoto. Although, ironically, the greatest use for us is its use as a wakeup light it has around the base.
My daughter knows that the Yoto is in charge of when she needs to stay in bed or when she can walk around. "When the light is red, stay in bed."
We tried that with our children but neither of them pay any attention, despite our best efforts.
There's also an RPI based version at https://github.com/MiczFlor/RPi-Jukebox-RFID
Or one for arduino https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41500071
Which was also forked for ESP32 and has its own community https://github.com/biologist79/ESPuino
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Big fan of the Yoto! The fact you can easily record your own content (grandparents reading stories, etc.) is great.
Also a big fan of the Yoto player, it's helped our daughter stay in her room at bedtime.
For tinkering, there's an unofficial API (WIP)[0] to interact with the player, integration with Home Assistant[1], and Yoto's sample app[2].
[0]: https://github.com/cdnninja/yoto_api
[1]: https://github.com/cdnninja/yoto_ha
[2]: https://github.com/yotoplay/yoto-sample-app
We love our Yoto!
I have no use for one but after watching the video I kind of wanted one anyway.
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My daughter (almost 2) loves her Yoto and brings it everywhere. The NFC card to play music means she can (and has) put peanut butter in the card slot and it doesn't matter.
there's a similar one in france: https://www.mybookinou.com , they use it in nursery school
> Less directly was Tonies, an audio player for kids that uses NFC on Skyrim style figures to trigger stories.
My youngest, at 16, still loves the Tonie Box. She uploads random stuff to their web portal and plays it quietly at night. Her sister, in the top bunk, had a string / pulley connected to the figurine so that she could restart the music from her bed by lifting it just a little bit and putting it back down.
Amazing write up and work in general putting this together - this is such an ideal form of the word "hack" in its incredibly low cost, durability, and usefulness.
I was staggered when I saw your build cost list - I know ESPs are in the realm of "Cheap AF" but all of those NFC cards also for $9?! This is one of the few reasons I would shop Alibaba! We're talking around $15 total for the full NFC setup if you can print/rig yourself a case! (yes, of course, another $X for screens, sound etc)
I have run into such a crazy amount of cool hacky kid tech in the past couple of days for some reason (this and Makey Makey), and am so lucky to have done so. I can't wait to outfit my kids with this, it is going to blow their minds.
I want to hook it up to Jellyfish because I feel Plex is total marketing trash these days but as soon as I can get time I am all over this.
You can get loads of NFC tags as stickers extremely cheap. I think using the cards is better here just for durability but if you're willing to put in a bit more DIY and accept a slightly less durable final product you could print it on a heavy card stock and stick one of the innumerable NFC stickers to that then laminate.
Unfortunately and at least as of March, Jellyfin doesn't support deeplinks.
https://github.com/jellyfin/jellyfin-androidtv/discussions/3...
The author himself pointed out in the end of the article that blurays are cheap- in my view they provide a close enough physical experience. I would probably stick with Blu-ray approach?
You don’t have kids do you?
They leave the last disc laying on the TV cabinet. It never, ever goes back in the box. I found three stacked at one point, and I think one disc just outright disappeared and we had to get a new one. It wasn’t until the discs started skipping that the kids even thought about taking care of them.
Sooo many forum postings of parents lamented the loss of VHS when DVDs and Blu rays took over because of the kid factor. I saw a lot of people backing up their discs and giving their kids the duplicates because of the cost of (especially Disney) films. I also think slot-load (rare for disk players) is a lot more durable than tray-load for kids.
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I for one don't own a blu-ray anymore and really don't want to - they feel to me like LaserDiscs or BetaMax at this point! :)
Plus, to fathom a three-year-old-destroyer-of-property handling your blu-ray disc collection, I shudder! They are great frisbees, and coasters, and etc.
If I even still owned blu-rays I might consider ripping them and then converting to this just to avoid the above mentioned pain.
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> I would probably stick with Blu-ray approach?
Kids, little ones especially, are quite rough on discs. That's if they even make it back into the case!
If you search more you can cut price by half
The movies visible in the photos in the article, and their runtimes in minutes, are:
> We have two boys, and the eldest is permitted a 30-minute TV session in the morning and another in the evening.
So...if one of them wants to watch The Lion King or Toy Story they have to split it over at least 3 viewing sessions split over at least 2 days? And for anything else on that list they need to split it over at least 4 viewing sessions?
That seems overly restrictive. Yes, limiting kid's TV time is probably a good idea, but would it really hurt to have some flexibility so that they can finish a movie in one session? Maybe let them bank sessions, so they can say skip morning TV for 3 days, and apply that time to the 4th day's evening to get a slot for a whole movie.
Author here (surreal to see my post at the top of HN!)
My kids are 3 and 2, and they don't watch TV like adults. They watch a bit of movie, get up, walk around, do something else, come back, and watch a bit of another movie or even switch to a TV show. It's weird!
I like your idea about flexibility, but they're too young right now. Maybe we'll introduce your "bank" concept when they get older or increase the "TV budget". But for now we stick to 2x 30 minutes.
> […] but they're too young right now.
Indeed they are. I have a five year old who is now old enough to choose his own films and series from a selection curated by us. A system like this would be fine for children of his age.
But 2 and 3? They are too young to choose their own media at all. Not because they can't, but because they can't judge the impact. For toddlers you really want to be the one in control about what they watch (and that horrible Bing can die in a tragic bunny bonfire).
The Lion King, Wall-E? That's just overloading them at that age (and both are rated 6+ in the Netherlands). You can start with those at 5 or so depending on the child, or later if you've noticed them reacting too intensely to films rated 6+. For now? Stick with shorts suitable for their age, and move on to films (like Ghibli's Ponyo) at 4 or 5 as a special treat.
Autonomy is all fine and well, but screens have an enormous impact on developing children. This is a really cool project, but you might want to reflect on how their brains are developing and what you as a parent can do to guide them.
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> "It's weird"
Not that weird I think... my 5 year old does exactly this. He cant sit through a full movie. My 7 year old also had that issue but now she can.
I have learned that doing just weekends for TV is much better for small kids so they don't get used to TV watching.
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Totally normal for kids of such age. A 5-7 year old maybe could sit through a whole movie, but only if it would be engaging for him.
Every parent is required to say they only allow very limited screen time even if secretly they all allow quite a bit more.
Well, the nice thing about having borders is that you can allow those borders to disappear every now and then. Feels like something special for the kid!
Lol, kind of true!
We stick to the 2x30 minutes rule for 90% of the time but we do make occasional exceptions like when they're ill.
Might change when they get older though.
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Plenty of parents do use screens responsibly. My five year old can watch one episode of whichever series he is watching at the moment after school (currently Hilda, which Netflix really should push harder than some of the crap that gets suggested). In the weekends sometimes we allow for one film instead.
It's not a challenge to keep a limit on screen time at this age.
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My 4 year old naturally does this anyway, and I can imagine many kids do.
We don't have a set amount of allowed TV time for her, but she typically watches around 15-20 minutes of TV and then gets up and does something else.
The only real rule we have around it is that TV (unlike music) is not a background sound. If you're done watching something, you have to turn it off, not just let it play forever.
May depend on the kids' ages and what sort of viewer they are. As a young kid (like around age 6 and below) watching a movie episodically would've been fine for me. Time was different; I had no sense of a story arc spanning more than an hour.
FTA
> Between certain hours, we allow them to watch TV. They can watch any movie they like. They can even switch between movies. But the timeframe is fixed. They can watch a good chunk of one movie, or they can watch a tiny bit of 10 different movies. It's completely up to them.
1 hour of TV time PER DAY for small kids is considered restrictive?
I would have thought it's much less. What would be an equivalent restriction on the phone/tablet/more actively engaging devices?
> 1 hour of TV time PER DAY for small kids is considered restrictive?
In general, probably not. My point was that in the specific case of movies, where even movies designed for children usually run at least 80+ minutes, maybe an exception should be made so that the kid can watch the whole movie in one session if they want to and have the patience and attention span to do so.
You can still limit the average to an hour a day. They just have to mix shorter content with movies to keep the average down.
Breaking off movies after an hour is going to put the break around the act II low point in most children's movies. If the kid got invested in the characters and story that's a terrible place to make them stop until tomorrow.
My 3 year old gets 15 minutes (!) max per day. Only on weekdays. Weekends no screens.
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Eh it'll probably be a reason for therapy when they're older, but the skill to say "okay, time for bed" and stop watching in the middle of something is an underrated skill.
IMO it’s at least as important to be satisfied after one thing has ended, and not start the next thing.
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we handle it similar; <30min/session, <1h/day, <2h/week
there is a round robin process for who gets to pick from the catalogue and if there is no amicable consensus, we split or override.
30mins is about the attention span of a kid and you can see them get anxious and distracted after that, most of the time.
This is so cool! I do something similar for music - I have posters up for albums, and a small NFC tag is embedded behind the poster, so tapping my phone to the poster’s corner and clicking the notification begins playing it immediately. I really want to make a collection of cassette-or-record-style plastic cards with album art and NFC tags, and hook it up to a speaker, so I can place my album on a pedestal and it starts playing immediately.
I do the same for my CDs. I have them ripped on Plexamp and I place the NFC tags inside a corner of the booklet. So I tap the phone to the corner of a CD case instead. But my plan is to build a device like OP's so I don't even need the phone.
Great idea. You could tag vinyl sleeves, too, so you could play from them as you look at them on the floor.
It’s digital-only but I have folders of records on my phone Home Screen. They’re shortcuts that play the album, and the album art is the icon.
What a great idea! Thanks! it never occurred to me to do this
What app do you have on your phone to do this?
I use "NFC Tools" to write the URL, which I copy the album/song URL from Spotify and embed it. When I hold my phone near it, the URL appears in the notifications, and clicking it opens it in Spotify, which then starts playing it. I have a bag of 100 tags I got from a friend so no shortage there.
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I'd love to do something similar for myself, but having never worked with NFC I see there are tons of different options. Would you mind mentioning what tags you got?
An Amazon search for "NFC 215 round cards" on Amazon should get you there! There's also stickers if you want something more permanent.
I love vinyl so I built m daughter a wooden vinyl player with wooden discs that carry an embedded nfc so now she can put some vinyl on herself :))
This is lovely.
This feels like a new genre of hardware hacking to me, where someone is motivated to make a device out of compassion for their family or others. It reminds me of this instance where someone designed their own peristaltic pump to ensure their grandfather can eat:
https://hackaday.com/2015/11/10/3d-printed-peristalic-pump-h...
I seem to recall another similar device to this posted on HN also, but with audiobooks.
On an unrelated note, the modern digital age does deprive me of my longtime love of removable media, whether analogue or digital. There's a mechanical satisfaction in having a physical token which is decisively inserted into something. USB drives just don't have the kinetic enjoyment of a floppy disk or tape. (Clearly the next iteration of the OP's design needs a motorised NFC card loader, ATM-style. ;))
> (Clearly the next iteration of the OP's design needs a motorised NFC card loader, ATM-style. ;))
Author here. TOTALLY!!
No!
Look instead to Skylanders. You need to make a 3d printed avatar for each movie with an NFC antenna in the base.
This is great, I looked into doing something similar when my daughter was little. I didn't get very far and she learned how to use the remote control pretty quickly. I honestly think it was better for her to do it the 'old' way as she's pretty digitally savvy (for her age) than I would have expected.
I remember when I was little I figured out how to use the VHS to set timers record shows etc, I think making things difficult is useful, it forces some learning to get a 'reward'.
I agree, and ultimately think it's also learned behavior, and seeing those at home interested in technology and getting a deeper meaning about things.
A lot of comments seem to think that millenials or younger don't have an interest in technology, but I think that's only because they see their older peers or family members perfectly fine with a dumbed down interface to get their needs taken care of.
As a 45 year old, that got started with computers at 2 years old watching and playing around with games my dad would write on an Atari 800XE/XL system, my 13 year old son gets all of the touch interfaces, but also picked up a serious interest in tech from watching me. I didn't want to push him into software, wanting him to find his own way with his interests, but in the last year he has shown an interest in figuring out what is behind all those touch interfaces and websites that just do things "automatically."
I had taking apart crystal radios and learning to put multiple viruses on the family computer to have them fight for the "ultimate" virus as my learning experience. I think curiosity is learned, and even encouraging things outside of technology can lead into technology or science/math/problem solving. Younger generations are just as hungry for knowledge, we just have hidden it away, and need to give them a peek behind the scenes.
You’re retelling of your Atari story has resurfaced memories of me fiddling with a Commodore 64 tape drive to make some game work :)
After this post, perhaps tech for kids need to be difficult to encourage learning.
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I built my kids "the box", which had a similar concept. It was an upholstered box with a frosted acrylic top and a camera mounted inside facing up. You would put cards on top of the box and it would recognize the symbols and take an action, like play a song or read a word. I used large printouts of Data Matrix, as I found that faster and most accurate to decode. The front (up-facing) side would have a colorful design.
In the most advanced version I had it read letters to read a word aloud (eg, a spelling tool). All so I could reenact the scene from Sneakers where they rearrange Scrabble tiles from SETEC ASTRONOMY to TOO MANY SECRETS :)
> I think making things difficult is useful, it forces some learning to get a 'reward'.
I found the same growing up. But at the time (the 90s) there weren't hyperstimuli available in the form of smartphones, streaming services, or engagement-optimized algorithmic content feeds. The broadcast television that was available was often boring, or at least poorly matched to any given person's interests at a given time. We didn't have a game console at home either, so getting a game to work meant installing it on the family computer, and maybe troubleshooting problems myself.
I don't know that I'd have learned as much as I did about computers at that age if such hyper-optimized things had been available to me as a kid. And I think their availability today proves that any notion of "digital natives" was a fallacy. The generation below me (Gen-Z, Zoomers?) seem to be experts at using touchscreen devices and social networks. Some of them are even flocking to text based AI games that seem intriguing. But they see computers largely as fixed appliances, and most give up pretty quickly when a computer malfunctions (whether it comes in the form of a phone, laptop, tablet, television, or something else).
I now deliberately work to banish (and keep banished) as much of that algorithmically optimized hyperreality as possible out of my home and life. I feel much better without it, and always have. But I also think it's a good practice to get used to so that, if I ever have kids, it'll be the norm I pass on to their daily lives. Your first computer should require some assembly and tinkering, and digital activities which are really just skinner boxes created as lures by some or other corporation shouldn't be available to compete with more difficult, more rewarding pursuits.
> The generation below me (Gen-Z, Zoomers?) seem to be experts at using touchscreen devices and social networks.
Pet theory: This perception is largely from their confidence in messing around until something works, which has only a loose connection to the operator's competence.
Younger generations have grown up with devices that are (A) more idiot-proofed and (B) cheaper and easier to replace and (C) less supervision when using it. This leads to a different way of approaching the problem, which may be more-effective but isn't necessarily more-knowledgeable.
In contrast, older generations who grew up with "never press these two buttons at the same time or it can explode" operate with an implicit assumption that those Kids These Days must know something their parents don't in order to mess around so casually.
> The generation below me (Gen-Z, Zoomers?) seem to be experts at using touchscreen devices and social networks.
And, importantly, it's not that they learned the new tech fluently while millennials haven't adapted—there aren't "modern" digital skills that aren't readily learned by millennials, but there certainly are fewer Gen Z adults who have learned to fluently use the still-more-powerful keyboard-based tech that we picked up as kids.
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I unplugged the Alexa for about 6 months, that was a good reset, and we have a few tablets etc but no nonsense apps installed.
Although time is ticking and I be we'll soon have the influence from 'peer pressure' - we're getting our daughter prepped for secondary/high school next year so she's got an old iPhone to play around with but thankfully she has zero interest in tech as a distraction. She sends a message to her friends every now and then, she watches some tutorials on Youtube for the piano, and of course some cat videos. My bigger worry is that she is going to bankrupt me from books... she's reading a new one every other week and has a real attachment to them so I can't persuade her to go to the local library...
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I had a programmable calculator, a 8-bit computer (with few games but with built-in basic, assembly, and a debugger), then a PC, all before easy internet access. These were hyperstimuli all right.
For "project adjacent", look at `catt` - Cast ALL the things!
https://blog.fuzzymistborn.com/homeassistant-and-catt-cast-a...
You can cast YouTube URLs directly, as well as general media files over the local network.
My theory is QR-codes up to a camera: http://192.168.1.123/randomvid.php?topic=XYZ => shuf | head -1 | catt --target=$MY_TV
You can even do QR code reading via a web-page, and "add-to-homepage" if you wanted to put it onto an iPad.
Obviously the OP project is better thought out, but it's quite good to learn different bits and pieces and strategies about deep linking and internal media.
Ah, that is really cool! I love it.. adds the tactile element back to the experience.
Reminds me of this Raspberry Pi + SONOS project from a few years back:
https://www.hackster.io/mark-hank/sonos-spotify-vinyl-emulat...
I actually set that system up and it was awesome! Really was cool and fun to have the little cards, look through them and then "tap" to start the album. Unfortunately I needed the Raspberry Pi for an emergency and then have never fot around to running again. I fear now, with all the SONOS fun (that has destroyed my 8 speaker setup :'( ), it won't work any more.
Thanks for sharing that! I built something similar but I was talking directly to Spotify and outputting through the RasPi. I had no idea Sonos provided an http api. I thought they were locked down. Maybe worth another go!
I made a similar system but for music, using QR codes on plastic cards and a webcam, when my daughter was 1. After a year or so we switched to just having a standalone numkey pad where she could just punch in numbers from a jukebox-style catalog. https://github.com/dmd/nkplay/
She's now 10, and knows ~100 playlists by number. "I want to listen to 37!"
Your numpad solution looks great! Would you have a photo of the whole setup? I thought about doing the same, but I fear to end with cables and PCB everywhere in my children's room if I take this path :)
There's honestly nothing really to see. It's a raspberry pi in a standard plastic case[0] with 3 cables coming out of it - power, usb to the numkey, and audio (male to male headphone jack) to the speakers.
The pi and power are hidden behind a bookshelf, so all that is actually visible is the numkey and the speaker.
[0] https://www.microcenter.com/product/608178/4_Official_Case_-...
We realised that even a lot less cool than nfc, just put an inexpensive blueray reader + disc movies next to the tv and no internet connection was the best option for us.
I'm going this way, also our local library has a very nice selection of movies in DVD so we can expand the experience to going there and picking up.
This! We also discovered out teeny tiny local library has a movie section. Each time I feel like a kid in a video store from the 90’s! You can even book a title on their webapp and pick it up when available, it really feels great.
Having offline and finite media consumption feels much more satisfying than the modern endless scrolling IMHO.
Disc movies get trashed by children young enough for an NFC system to be appropriate.
for anyone that's a retro gamer that plays roms / emulators etc.. there's a great project with tons of great artists making prints called TapTo. Most of the setups are with a Mister FPGA setup, but it works with pretty much any setup with a bit of tweaks. I really dig the idea and may integrate one into an arcade cabinet in the office.
https://github.com/TapToCommunity/tapto
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=73Kx3jwyk0U
This is absolutely awesome.
For v2 I'd say the NFC cards be the size and shape of a VHS and you have to leave them in the slot to play. If you take them out it stops playing.
Maybe v3 you need to virtually rewind them before they work again? :-)
V4 all the cards are stored in a little blockbuster and the child has tokens he can use to 'rent' movies
V5 he starts franchising....
OP here
Definitely crossed my mind! Especially the slot system!
Rewinding could be fun as well. I could use our Sonos speakers to play the VHS rewinding sound, lol
> slot system
I have a similar setup but I've been using chip cards and a card reader. I find it much more intuitive than just placing an NFC card over a reader. The card reader blinks when a card is inserted, changes colour, it's all very obvious and physical, with immediate feedback.
In my case I only use it with music though (I deem them still too small to choose movies themselves).
I've been using reclaimed chip cards (various bank cards mostly) which all have an easy to read kind of ID, but I haven't been able to find a way to write things to blank cards as easy as one can do with NFC cards though.
Kids are gonna go to college still believing you have to rewind discs.
Do it. That's a long game prank.
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Hahaha excellent!
This is an awesome example of the kind of innovation which overlong copyright prevents.
There’s no particularly good reason that it should be legally impermissible for someone to build and sell a system like this loaded with movies from before, say, 2010 (or 2000, or whatever), but instead what the prospective entrepreneur would be legally able to include would be … Steamboat Willie, and other films of that vintage (as an aside, while Disney’s had a pretty rough couple of years, I’m pretty sure that Steamboat Willie being out of copyright has nothing to do with any of that).
This sort of experience shouldn’t be limited to children of high-tech folks with access to 3D printers: it should be possible for any child — or adult!
That kind of innovation is quite common abroad. No one is paying for content or cares about copyright in poorer countries.
There is more content now then there are eyeballs or time available to consume any of it.
What happens to value and price of product when there is more of it produced than consumed?
Keep an eye on the financials of the streaming services; at the moment few are profitable, and they will increase their prices and/or decrease their spending on new productions.
If there's a business case to be made, companies like Netflix might release a physical product for this... but I doubt they would, because of the investment and time required vs the revenue. Spotify tried something with an in-car device, but they cancelled and recalled the product pretty quickly.
Streaming services rely on volume; for them, hardware just isn't worth it.
If not for excessively long copyrights, streaming might not have taken off in the same way. You could instead buy e.g. $250 HDD that's loaded with 2,000 movies from 20+ years ago or whatever. A company could sell a NAS-like appliance that's designed to slot in drives that are pre-loaded with tons of media along with a card library like this to play them. Since they'd be out of copyright, there's no need for DRM and HDCP and all that, so the system might actually work without tons of fiddling. You wouldn't need high-paid techies to maintain a gargantuan delivery platform; you just clone drives at manufacturing time and ship them.
There's definitely a business case to be made with this if it were legal. There's sketchy Chinese pre-built mini PCs with emulators + 50k-100k ROMS that you can buy for ~$100 on Amazon right now, so basically following this exact business model. I'm actually surprised that there aren't similar products for movies (from what I can tell anyway).
Cool use of NFC tags! I remember seeing a similar idea with album art covering the walls, and you could hold your phone up to read an NFC tag hidden on the back to stream that album on the stereo.
Looking for link
EDIT - not the one I remembered but here’s one implementation https://andreasjr.com/blog/interactive-wall-of-album-art/
This rules, high probability I attempt to replicate. I got my 3yo a yoto, which has a similar UX but all audio, highly recommend!
Seconded. The Yoto is great. It also supports arbitrary MP3 assignment to their NFC cards. It’s all proprietary but has been rock solid over multiple years.
Soon, your sons will learn how to hack into this system, bypass your time limits, use the NFC cards you provided to play other cartoons, or convert your NFC reader into a room door lock.
OP here
I hope so!
I discovered how cheap NFC tags and readers were a few years ago and now I have completed several hobby projects based on that concept.
When we buy books for our younger nieces and nephews we buy companion stuffed animals and then sew an NFC tag (the small quarter size ones) into them with the YouTube read-along url encoded on it.
Really cool! I want this for my own vinyl so I can physically flip through my collection (with nfc tags stuck on) then place my sleeve of choice on a stand (with embedded nfc reader) to listen to the “vinyl” without having to touch a computer. That would be amazing and you’ve just proved it’s totally doable.
Love seeing fun ideas for NFCs, I went into a bit of a dive on NFC/RFID tech a while back after hearing about the game Dropmix (which used really cool tech I haven't seen anywhere else) and it feels like there could be so much room for fun tactile experiences with some of the protocols.
I was just talking with my wife that that we wish there was a streaming service that made the choices more intentional and limited. Like for each show there should only be one episode available a day. This is definitely in the same spirit. Love the idea and implementation!
It is not as simple as some other service already set up but you might look into ErsatzTV which attempts to make streaming more like old school TV channels where you watch whatever is on at 8:30am instead of picking like at a buffet.
So you could set it up so that Bluey is only on at 3pm for 30 minutes a day, or whatever.
I've thought about setting it up for my kids (and wife) but haven't done it yet.
Looks great. I am working on side to learn product design by working on a similar system for music. The idea is to have the tactile feel of a vinyl like system but with the features of a digital library and ecosystem. The base implementation was really straightforward and hardly a few hours but to make it bridge the gap we see with our digital tools emulating analog ones is quite fun to work on. From the latency involved between placing the card to the output from a remote service, the sound dial's latency when paired with bluetooth speakers all take one away from the experience. It's also fun to learn little leathercrafting and concrete moulding for the prototype design.
I always thought it would be nice to simply add QR codes to my vinyls. Get that feel of browsing, and then simply open the Spotify URL.
This is incredible! I want to replicate this at home as well, but I would prefer to use QR codes since they also support URLs. Any reason why you went with NFC instead of QR code? I assume it's doable with a raspberry pi and webcam instead of tapping?
OP here
I actually hadn't considered QR codes.
To be honest, I had some NFC tags laying around and I was desperate to find a project for them ;)
QR codes might be more complicated because you need a camera and a well-lit environment. NFC tags don't have that issue.
My thought process was to laminate them to make them easier to make at home. I agree that it’s definitely more child friendly. This maybe a project I attempt at home and will post if I’m successful.
I was surprised that you opted to use the tag ID as a primary key instead of writing the relevant metadata to the NFC tags in the first place. NTAG215s have about 500 bytes worth of rewritable storage, so you could even embed the full deep links if you so desired.
https://www.shopnfc.com/en/content/6-nfc-tags-specs
It also seems that ESPHome has support for reading / writing this arbitrary metadata, once you move to the PN532:
https://esphome.io/components/binary_sensor/pn532.html#ndef
(It's not clear that you can access the metadata with the RC522 through ESPHome, but the hardware should support it.)
But hey, what you've got works.
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It's probably easier to embed an NFC tag in something child-friendly, compared to printing QR codes on something that small kids won't destroy.
Also in this case (since it just laminated cards anyway) the usability is much easier. The kid just has to touch something. While with a QR it has to be positioned in a way that a camera can see and focus to it.
I like the idea of restricting the time time frame duration of watching movies. I would suggest adding a electric zapper to the couch that when they try to watch movies past a certain time they get zapped at a certain voltage eliciting a negative response.
Do you have boys? I guarantee you all mine would do is run out the clock and then he and his friend would try to push each other’s faces into the electrodes.
At least it’s not screen time?
This is such a fab project. <3 Cool electronics, simple workflow, 3D printing, and useful service! <3 <3 <3
Loved reading that and realising that the author has hit on something. I do wonder though, who was looking after the house and kids whilst the author spent all the time researching and building!
Imagine the benefit to the child if their parent was sitting next to them reading, or building something together out of blocks
Heck, even as an adult I would enjoy something like this. I love the idea.
OP here.
Same here! I have debated making something similar for my personal music collection. I used to meticulously organize my albums in iTunes and listen to them in full. Somehow I stopped doing that with Spotify. The magic of the album is gone for me.
This is a cool and nerdy project, and I support that.
From a functional perspective would it not be simpler to simply burn dvd / blu-rays and if they are old enough use that system? (Given that kids are not exactly careful with physical media burning copies takes away the worry)
I dont get a feel for how many movies you have printed cards for, but it doesn't look that many.
Something like a Streamdeck with buttons for each movie could work but then you do lose part of the physical media feeling.
I've been buying CDs as well as burning FLAC albums I have on blanks for basically this same reason, the limited choices and slightly higher switching costs is more enjoyable to me. And CDs still cost about as much as they ever did, which means they're much cheaper now with inflation.
I found vinyl CD labels [1] that I can print on my color laser printer that look pretty decent, it only takes a few minutes to burn the CD, find an image of a retail disc and put it in the label's Canva template.
My car is a 2017 and it still has a CD player, and I also found a fairly inexpensive portable player [2] that charges with USB-C, the anti-skip is pretty impressive now. I can put it in my pocket and walk around or clean the house and I've never had it skip, it will actually spin down the disc when it's read far enough ahead.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0C2V9D3FD
[2] https://klimtechs.com/products/klim-nomad-portable-cd-player...
If you want a really impressive portable optical disc format, consider looking into MiniDisc!
The players are even more impressive (I have one that plays something like 20 hours on a single AA battery), you can re-record the disks via USB using a WebUSB based webapp [1] these days for NetMD recorders, and the disks actually are almost infinitely re-recordable and much more stable than CD-Rs (which are write-once and only last a couple of years).
[1] https://stefano.brilli.me/webminidisc/
Deep links are now possible with Infuse as well:
https://support.firecore.com/hc/en-us/articles/215090997-API...
I also evaluated Plex but ended up with Infuse as it seemed perfect for my needs. The Apple TV app is great. Plex probably has more features though. I renew it once a year.
OP here
Wow, thanks for sharing this! I used to pay for Infuse as well, but switched to Plex for the deep linking. Might go back to Infuse because the Plex app occasionally freezes at startup.
[dead]
I build something very similar, but for playing music/audio books in my kids rooms. But this is not why I am commenting: I found "HERMA 5028 Universal" stickers to be a very good fit for rfid/nfc cards; I don't know if they're available where you live, but here in germany they're a great solution for labeling cards.
PS: I will also publish my solution once I rewrite a few parts of it (cleanup).
I'd be super interested in your writeup, I'd like to build a homemade Tonie for my kids as well. Any way you could contact me when you're finished or do you have a blog I could regularly check out?
I have two small kids and this project looks amazing!
Anyway, I have to ask: Is it possible to make a similar project for Netflix and/or YouTube?
From the article
The Apple TV also supports deep links for other services. Here are examples for the biggest streaming services:
The only problem with these services is that they will require you to select a profile before the movie/show will start playing. With Plex, you can enable "auto login", but I haven't tried it for the other services.
And then the issue of when the streaming service removes the choice; the card become obsolete.
Not that bad of a ordeal though.
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Nice idea, and great implementation. And I really resonate with the "physical media is great" mantra. That's why I still buy a lot of DVDs of the movies I or my kids like. Last winter we had a two day internet outage, and all of the neighbors came to me for lending DVDs :D That experience reinforced my believe in physical media more than ever!
I love this. I dislike the half hour brackets. Love how the OP frequently talks about his childhood and being able to pick movies - he didn't half a timer going that determined when the movie ended, the movie did.
Kids movies are like an hour long. How are kids ever going to develop any sort of an attention span if they never see the ending of things
This is a very cool project, and I like the nostalgic feel of it! However, this project got me thinking:
We are on a forum filled with people working on these super addicting infinite scroll technologies at YouTube, Instagram, maybe even TikTok. At the same time though, this post removing all these addictive technologies has reached the #1 spot on HN (and HN is deliberately made without any of this addicting tech!!)
I think it is time for people to really realize how addicting the tech they are making is, without masking it with words like 'friction' and 'engagement'. And hopefully they will slowly work on making their tech a little bit less addictive.
Before Covid we had some kind of movement like this, but it has sadly dwindled.
i found the “thanks to Hans Wurst” part funny: it is a common way to stay anonym while inputting a real sounding name, like John Doe, but nobody really has this name
It's also the name of one of those old "web fun communities", like CollegeHumor, and it's even still operational: https://www.hans-wurst.net/
Simpler than this is just switching to DVDs. Not only do I not have extra bandwidth strain on my home internet, but there are no recurring fees, no worries about legality, and lots of extra features and games that kids enjoy. DVDs are Blu Ray are the best format for movies that currently exist, and arguably the best way to actually own a movie legally. A good TV antenna serves for watching news in my area.
As a consumer, I try follow the reverse of William Painter's advice to King Camp Gillette before he invented the famous razor, "invent something people use and throw away" and arrive at "buy things you can actually own and use repeatedly."
Have you ever actually seen kids under 10 manhandle optical media?
It's not a pretty sight.
This is really cool and demonstrates the power of stuff like home assistant really well.
I’ve recently rediscovered my old music collection from the pre-streaming days on an old NAS, thousands of mp3s with carefully curated id3 tags etc. I’m almost tempted to create a similar system but for albums!
This is great. And not just for kids. I think I'll copy the idea for my music and film collection. Picking up something and tapping somewhere feels like a nicer experience than navigating menus. I wish my e-reader had an NFC reader to do something similar with my books.
This is really awesome - just had my first kid, and I think I’ll do something similar. Well done OP!
OP here.
Thank you and congrats! Enjoy the ride!
Man, this is such a fun project. I understand where you are coming from. You can do this with music too. There a lot of children audio books or songs where you have the same “issue” that a parent has to operate YouTube or Spotify.
Tonies are popular in my area. We use CDs. Both are available from our local library.
There's a commercial equivalent we use for audio-only stories called Yoto - really high quality. Same level of agency, but less screen time. Good for bedtimes, but the kids also carry the thing round the house to listen to.
I love this! The constraints it applies to selection + the tangible interaction gives children a sense of definitive knowledge and expectation.l and agency. Which are very good for development. Congrats, I love it!
This is really cool, it actually reminds me of how people thought the future would be in the past.
"Ah you'll just scan a punch card of course and it will play a movie."
You're the hipster Dad now.
This would also be amazing for tech-disadvantaged seniors!
This technology could be used to benefit people with developmental disabilities like Alzheimer’s disease. TVs and streaming services have become increasingly complex compared to 30 years ago and it makes it harder for people who have cognitive issues. Wish I had something like this for my mom, who struggles to change channels on our UI heavy smart TV.
This is so cool. I’ve struggled with getting my media setup to work with any automations to call into the Roku and link to any app, let alone app content.
Really awesome project. This bit made me think though:
> First: you have a limited choice of movies to watch. When I was a kid, we didn't have an infinite catalog of movies to watch.
Something always rubs me the wrong way with this way of thinking. "X is good because I had X when I was young." I don't necessarily disagree that X is good, but it's definitely not because you had it as a kid.
OP here
You make a good point. The "it was better in my day" argument isn't always valid. I didn't mean to imply that something is inherently good just because it existed in the past.
But I do believe that having a smaller collection is nicer. It leads to a deeper appreciation for what you have. Each item in your library feels more special and valuable. And getting something new becomes exciting (I still remember getting a copy of The Lion King on VHS). This isn't something I get from browsing Netflix because new stuff is constantly being added.
As a bonus, it also helps with decision paralysis, which young kids are more susceptible to. At least that's my experience. Give them lots of toys and they'll play with none. Keeping the toy selection limited and rotating them is better (at least for my kids).
Thank you for letting me reflect on this! I will rephrase the post.
That was very well said! We have our own experience with too much toys and I don't like it.
I really appreciate the effort you took for your kids here. Thanks for showing us!
I had the same reaction. There are many reasons why I also believe OP's solution is better than the usual having a kid use the remote to navigate Disney+.
Having a curated selection instead of a near infinite catalog full of noise is one of them. Not exposing the kids to a UX optimised for retention (a.k.a. addiction) would be my main motivation though.
Because I had that as a kid, would be at the bottom of the list.
It does help with decision paralysis, which can be especially hard for young kids. Not that it’s easy as an adult.
You could still have a giant library and rotate cards every week or something.
Yes, plenty of good reasons to like this project. I might buy something like it if it was off the shelf.
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It looks cool but in my attempts to do this I've discokered it takes too much time I could spend with mx kids or catching up on sleep
I don't have kids, but now I really want to build something like that too! Really nice idea and well executed!
I love this, the tactility of it is super good, and a good break from a world where everything is touchscreens!
Sweet project! I did something similar a few years back after reading this: https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/tag/#building-an-...
Prints from inkjet printer look amazing. Do these printers still clog up when not used for a month or two?
Author here.
I was quite surprised of the printing quality as well.
Never had it clog up. But I have all kinds of issues with that printer. Always connects to the network but randomly refuses to print. Sometimes it only prints half a page. Sometimes it prints half a page and retries by itself. Scanning is pretty much impossible on macOS because the drivers aren't maintained. etc...
It's horrible. But when it prints, the quality is good...
Honestly, I get cold sweats from the thought of having to print something.
I love this and I've thought about making something similar just for myself, because I miss fucking around with DVD cases, but I also don't want to own a large library of DVDs and blurays that takes up too much space.
I need to do this finally.
Projects for others are always exciting and rewarding. Thank you for sharing your experience.
It's funny to think that 20 years ago at an IBM austin office there was a demo of a similar thing (early 2000s) - before streaming was a thing yet, before YouTube, where Home Theatre PCs were around but more of a homebrew niche.
I always think it's great to do projects for others! I enjoyed reading your review.
Is there an option for an NFC reader that doesn’t require 3d printing or soldering?
You could probably use an old Android phone
Brilliant idea! We do something similar for our "make your own" Yoto cards.
We bought an off-the-shelf product like this (though, audio only) for our toddler. "Yoto Player." She can self-serve some stories or songs using cards to select a collection and it works great.
This is fun, but wouldn't some second hand Blu Rays have been simpler?
I'm not going to knock the idea down because that's how I grew up but, depending on your setup, buying a Blu-ray player means you have to hook it up (do you have enough inputs? Enough room? Do you need an extension cord?), choose the right source every time ("no, you're in HDMI1, you need S-Video"), have a second remote ("Have you seen the remote? No, the other one"), figure out why the box is empty (perhaps the disc is under the couch? And why does it have marmelade on it?), etc.
Maybe there's a plus to solutions like those where you learn how things work because you need to get them all to collaborate. But that's a different discussion.
Do you have children aged 0-4? My daughter had a CD player before we got the kids a Yoto each, and she and her little brother scratched the heck out of the CDs, not intentionally, but you just can't expect a child that age to handle them carefully enough not to scratch them.
I know Blu-Rays can take a bit more than a CD, but even they won't stand up to a 2yo.
If you teach your children to treat everything gently from birth, they won’t even know how to abuse things. They’ve never learned it.
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Personally I would just buy my kids a dvd player.
Edit: seem the author himself sort of agrees. He buys Blu-Rays and puts them on the Plex. Could just skip the Plex part and let them play the Blu-Rays...
My kids were very a bit too reckless with the DVDs - thrown all over the living room and some got scratched and/or soiled to the point they couldn’t be played and the dvd tray took some rough handling as well.
Than give them a VCR :P
Somewhat related: I wanted to track watch time, and perhaps set a time limit with Plex and HomeAssistant. Has anyone come up with a solution I can cheat off of?
I really like the vinyl stickers for the NFC cards. I recently got some blank white NFC cards and have been trying to figure out how to decorate them.
Very interesting that it's NFC is the most bang-for-your buck interface. Feels like a failure of software and hardware (button kit) alternatives.
Oh man, I read "NFT movie library" and was super confused because these cards are very much fungible... But a very cool project!
This is adorable and should be a commercial product.
This is basically video Yoto (kids audio book player) which has an ESP32 and a battery and speakers. Awesome!
What a brilliant idea! Not everyone's motivation of course, but I'm sure this has valid business potential.
I absolutely love this project. Bravo.
Hahaha, this is awesome!
This is a product.
This is so cool!
Fantastic work!
Really cool.
But why not just have them handle the blu rays directly? Unless - you ripped them to your Plex and resold them…
Or you store them away because once you've ripped them, you no longer need access to the physical item. So there's no point on having them using up the valuable space of the living room.
OP here.
Fair question! I have all the disks. They're in the garage gathering dust.
My kids are 3 and 2, so letting them handle the disks isn't a great idea right now. Might do that one day though!
Mine are 3 an 0. The three year old handles them fine - but kids are different;)
Because plastic disks attract scratches and kids can be rough with their toys.
But that's how OP did it in their youth and they seemingly grow up well.
It does seem that some parts of the story is missing. Maybe it's to safeguard the blurays or maybe they never existed in the first place?
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Then they will have learned a valuable lesson
I did something similar for my granny back when she was alive but no longer able to operate her CD player. http://dusted.dk/pages/easyplayer/
The fact that so many people come up with these kinds of solutions POST betamax begs questions. There seems to be some inherent unfairness in how unaccessible stuff is becoming.. It's interesting how we're trading the convenience (of signing up and paying montly for a dozen of rental services) for usability and tangibility..
Late Gen X rant incoming: WHEN I WAS A KID.. When I was 3 years old, I could put on the music I wanted to listen to.. It was easy, take the tape out of the case, put it into my cassette radio (if it didn't fit, try flipping it), and press the triangle.. poof, music.. I didn't need to be able to read, there were pictures on the tapes, so I could still find my favourite tunes.. When we got our first video machine, a betamax, it was the same thing, just put the tape into the machine, press the triangle, poof, the movie I had chosen played on the TV..
Then came DVDs, I was older then, so it was no problem for me, but, usability wise, DVDs were a step backwards.. You pop it in and press the tr.. No, you're met with unskippable copyright disclaimers and then presented with an animated menu, where you needed to be able to read to understand how to start the movie, suddenly, the movie itself contained (non standardized) ways of starting it, selecting chapters and such.. Sure, we traded the amazing ability to look at deleted scenes for the ability of of a small child to be able to start it.. but honestly, not even worth it..
Skip to online streaming services and their crappy apps.. Jesus.. Disney is how big of a company and their app is nearly unusable compared to a stack of VHS tapes..
We're putting untold layers of unneeded complexity on EVERYTHING these days, and I'm not even sure we do it because we can, I'm afraid we're doing it because we don't know how not to..
The early VCRs, cassette players and CD players were simple due to technological and economical constraints, but those constraints forced an extremely intuitive mode of operation which was transferable between similar devices.
We're leaving a world polluted, drowned in untold complexity at all levels for our children, and honestly, we can't even navigate it very well ourselves, even if we have most of the story about how things got to be that way in the back of our heads. Stuff that we understand deeply already seems like complete magic to the younger generations.. We ought to do better, to builder simpler and more BASIC systems at every level, from instruction set architecture through to UI.. The fact people find it reasonable that you almost have to use a "tech stack" is abysmal.. There shouldn't HAVE to be really much of anything between your code and the metal it runs on.
All that aside, this is a great idea! I'm going to do something simiar for my kid I think.
Dang, the level of engineering to recreate what is essentially a VHS
The electro mechanical engineering inside a VHS player is so much more impressive.
I find so much of modern technology to be a huge step backwards.
Example: People used to call friends over a land line and tell them to tune into the movie on whatever channel and they’d watch at the same time together from two different places. Doing anything like that with modern tech is such a hassle these days that no one does it anymore.
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I'd buy this
Now only problem is get Apple TV remote from my 4 year daughter back...
this is so sweet!
> And finally, if you're a non-English speaker, Blu-rays will include a dubbed version in your native language. This is a big plus for the kids, especially when they're as young as mine are now.
I grew up in a country where English is not the primary language spoken and when I was young all the cool shows and movies were in English. As a kid this was a huge incentive and went far above and beyond any education I had in English in my home country. I can’t overstate how valuable this has been to me as an immigrant to an English speaking country.
When I was 14-18 I watched anime (japanese dubs with eng subs). The censorship of the german dubs got me into it and I hated german subs plus the english subs were faster and the germans often were double translated (jap > eng > ger).
My english grades were very good thanks to it. Now I'm exposed more to english (movies, shows, internet, os) than german I've switched to german subs and started watching anime again 20 years later.
I keep fucking up numbers as german numbers are one-hundred-five-and-fifty instead of one-hundred-fifty-five and too many of my thoughts are in english.
There is a small movement trying to make both acceptable
https://zwanzigeins.jetzt/
> German numbers are one-hundred-five-and-fifty instead of one-hundred-fifty-five and too many of my thoughts are in english
Both are fine in the UK, though the "five-and-fifty" form is somewhat old fashioned. My Grandmother used to say numbers like that, especially for time. I refer you also to "Sing a Song of Sixpence" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sing_a_Song_of_Sixpence
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HTTP ERROR 503 Service Unavailable
Maybe this one of those sites that don't let you view them from outside their intended region, but I'd use 403 for that, so I assume it just got hugged
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Funny side note google translate maims that large first line translating it (correctly but also incorrectly) as "Also twenty-one and not just twenty-one!". Just a funny note where the translation is content correct but not context correct.
Would you have recommendations for an English speaker trying to learn German? Where do I go to find anime with good German subtitles? Or, maybe even a German dub?
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> german numbers are one-hundred-five-and-fifty
So are Dutch numbers.
That's funny I thought you were going to say it helped you learn Japanese.
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Yeah my native language is afrikaans which also has the 4 and 20 for 24 vibe. For me the difficulty is was with times tables strangely enough, as long after I started thinking primarily in English I was still doing times tables in afrikaans
The author is apparently a Dutch speaker, and English fluency really isn't a problem in Flanders or the Netherlands.
I think the language is close enough to English that it's easily picked up even watching only dubbed movies as a kid. In contrast friends of mine who mostly watched French-dubbed movies when they were small (because they were close to the border and Club Dorothée was better than whatever was available here) didn't learn much French, but they're fluent in English today (and that's with mandatory French lessons at school, much earlier than English lessons).
So English-version of movies is really unnecessary for kids here IMO. In my family we only watch French or Dutch (dubbed or original) movies with the kids and I think that's fine.
As a French-speaking Belgian living in the Dutch speaking part, in my experience and opinion, it's the opposite. Most French speaking folks can't speak a word of English because everything is dubbed, they are never exposed to the language. Meanwhile, there's no Dutch dubbing (because there's not enough Dutch speaking audience to justify the cost) and they all have fantastic English skills.
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As a 70's/80's kid, there wasn't much dutch language kids-tv, but there was a lot of english language kids-tv (mostly british). And I think I learned most of my english from saturday morning cartoons. English in school came later. Shame it doesn't work that well for learning japanese, because I do still watch a lot of anime (subbed), but still only know a handful of japanese words.
I'm from Flanders and I believe I learnt most English from JR/Dallas with Dutch subtitles and most German from Derrick with Dutch subtitles.
I have this general feeling based my 21 years bouncing around Europe that subtitle countries have better English than dub countries, although I'm not proposing that the link is causative
It's definitely a contributing factor. Living in the Netherlands, Dutch kids learn English through Youtube and Tiktok. Since it's a small country there's less Dutch spoken online, as opposed to German which has dubs for a lot of movies / TV shows.
My perception from traveling to 40+ countries is that countries where dubbing is common do so for the reason that the population is more illiterate and lower-educated in general, and that trend just extends to having less fluency in other languages.
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As an American that only knew English, Japanese media that was only available without English was my #1 motivation to learn more Japanese. By the time I was low-intermediate, basically everything was fan-subbed day 1, and it killed a lot of my motivation. There were still light novels, but the ones I really want to read are still quite a bit above me, and I have barely progressed since then.
And we're on the verge of AI being able to translate everything in basically real time, spoken or written.
I agree with your estimation of the value of media you want that's not available in your language, in regards to language learning. I'm a little sad that that motivation won't exist for many people in the future, but also happy that they can just enjoy the content.
It's interesting to me that in spite of everything you point out, demand for learning English (and other languages to a lesser effect) as a Second Language seems higher than ever.
for me it was computer games, specifically Civ 2. Imagine playing that as a second-grader with zero English. But I had strong motivation, and ploughed through the game, dictionary in hand.
Same here. Either the original Japanese release, or the English fandubbed JRPG release for emulators. The choice was clear there; and my English skills skyrocketted with Chrono Trigger.
At least you had graphics. Zork I did it for me, I still remember my first word: "forest". Never could figure out wtf a "stiletto" is though, it wasn't in the ancient dictionary I had at the time.
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I've found that most streaming services tend to have a good collection of subtitles and audio in various languages as well although I haven't compared that to physical media.
Furthermore, being forced to read subtitles can greatly increase literacy.
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An incredible amount of effort was made to avoid spending quality time with their children. Is this something to celebrate?