Comment by maweki
1 year ago
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.
We often decide on things by process of elimination: it's easier for us to identify what we don't want than what we do.
If there are 5 choices available, the effort to decide on one is low as the contrast between choices is high … and holding all options in memory is easy.
If there are 1,000 choices, the effort is high and the contrast is low … and you can't hold them all in memory, so there's always _something_ right around the bend that _might_ be the perfect thing.
I ripped a lot of my kids' DVDs because far too many of them had unskippable ads before the title screen. They wouldn't even let you fast forward!
> 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.
Amazon recently changed their Android TV app such that it auto-plays previews if you leave a title selected for more than a few seconds. I hate this feature and it gives me both decision paralysis and anxiety over finding something interesting to watch before the preview starts. I'd sooner turn the TV off than deal with that. If the setting for this can be changed, it is not available in the app itself.
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.
I think this ignores that marketing is essentially insidious. The goal is to get you to do more of x. We spend a lot of life building up the mental tools and energy and math skills to understand whether we actually want to do x or whether someone has simply suggested it very strongly.
Asking a 3 year old to develop that mental faculty just because we are a new generation learning new things feels incorrect.
> Is it not expected for people (or generations) to learn new things
If they are useful, and's an improvement, sure
But we just enshittified an experience that used to be good, and now have to ‘learn’ to cope with it
1 reply →
> 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.
I thought about that earlier today, I'm pretty sure it does.
Worst-case DVD experience: Step 1. Unbox TV and DVD Player Step 2. Plug scart cable from DVD player into TV. Step 3. Connect TV and DVD player to power, insert batteries in remotes. Step 4. Turn on DVD Player, TV, press "Source" a few times, the DVD player shows something. Step 5. Gander at some DVDs, decide which to watch. Step 6. Press Eject Step 7. Insert DVD Step 8. Press Eject Step 9. Press Play.
Now, assuming that electricity is provided, care to write down how to netflix? From the beginning, so we need to start by unboxing our very first computer, setting it up to the point where we can connect to the internet, also, we need an internet connection, oh, and some way to order that, so a phone.. Now, there will be a few steps before we reach to the point where we can create an email account, needed to even register for the streaming service.. Oh, something about credit cards too, and passwords for stuff?
Sure, you will think this is absurd, because all that stuff is "already in place" yeah, it is, for us, we set it up bit by bit, it's an enormous amount of infrastructure and different, disconnected concepts and services that is now REQUIRED before you can watch a movie..
I'll bet I can teach most 4 year olds to go from "empty living room with a power socket" to "watching dvd movies". You'll have a hard time convincing me you can teach them to go from empty living room with a power socket, to watching netflix before their next birthday or two :)
3 replies →
It does if you forgot your password and the service logged you out, again.
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.
Do you have episode run time just baked into each script or does it track via some other HA event to know when to turn off?
1 reply →
> 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.
Of what? I wouldn’t presume doing a Spotify here but linking to existing services or just your movie library. The movie poster art?