An NFC movie library for my kids

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.

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?

Every parent is required to say they only allow very limited screen time even if secretly they all allow quite a bit more.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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/

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

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.

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.

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.

Furthermore, being forced to read subtitles can greatly increase literacy.

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.

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

I am slowly preparing myself, but the usage tracking made me wonder. What are you planning to do?

Is there a product opportunity here? What are the risks?

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 :-).

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'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/

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.

There's also an RPI based version at https://github.com/MiczFlor/RPi-Jukebox-RFID

We love our Yoto!

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

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."

There is also this 37C3 Talk about Tonies https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DNufX-tss5M

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.

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

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.

Big fan of the Yoto! The fact you can easily record your own content (grandparents reading stories, etc.) is great.

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 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.

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 :)

What app do you have on your phone to do this?

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?

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.

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.

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?

If you search more you can cut price by half

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...

Because plastic disks attract scratches and kids can be rough with their toys.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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....

From the article

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Disc movies get trashed by children young enough for an NFC system to be appropriate.

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?

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.

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.

(Clearly the next iteration of the OP's design needs a motorised NFC card loader, ATM-style. ;))

Author here. TOTALLY!!

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 :)

The electro mechanical engineering inside a VHS player is so much more impressive.

Imagine the benefit to the child if their parent was sitting next to them reading, or building something together out of blocks

OP here

I hope so!

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.

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/

You could probably use an old Android phone

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.

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?

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.

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?

OP here.

Thank you and congrats! Enjoy the ride!

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.

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.

Tonies are popular in my area. We use CDs. Both are available from our local library.

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.

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!

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/