Ask Slashdot: How Can I Build a Private TV Channel For My Kids? 163
Long-time Slashdot reader ljw1004 writes:
I want to assemble my OneDrive-hosted mp4s into a "TV channel" for my kids -- so at 7am while I sleep in, they know they can turn the TV on, it will show Mr Rogers then Sesame Street then grandparents' story-time, then two hand-picked cartoons, and nothing for the rest of the day. How would you do this? With Chromecast and write a JS Chrome plugin to drive it? Write an app for FireTV? Is there any existing OSS software for either the scheduling side (done by parents) or the TV-receiver side? How would you lock down the TV beyond just hiding the remote?
"There are good worthwhile things for them to see," adds the original submission, "but they're too young to be given the autonomy to pick them, and I can do better than Nickeloden or CBBC or Amazon Freetime Unlimited."
Slashdot reader Rick Schumann suggested putting the video files on an external hard drive (or burning them to a DVD), while apraetor points out many TVs now play files from flash drives -- and also suggests a private Roku channel. But what's the best way to build a private TV channel for kids?
Leave your best answers in the comments.
"There are good worthwhile things for them to see," adds the original submission, "but they're too young to be given the autonomy to pick them, and I can do better than Nickeloden or CBBC or Amazon Freetime Unlimited."
Slashdot reader Rick Schumann suggested putting the video files on an external hard drive (or burning them to a DVD), while apraetor points out many TVs now play files from flash drives -- and also suggests a private Roku channel. But what's the best way to build a private TV channel for kids?
Leave your best answers in the comments.
I would start with Plex (Score:5, Informative)
Well I would start with a system like Plex and build a custom play list for them. I just say use plex because that is what I use but there are any number of plex like systems that would accomplish the play list part.
I"m not sure how you would do the timing.
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Plex would also be my route for something like this.Quick cronjob with a playlist pointing at the streaming endpoint.
Re:I would start with Plex (Score:5, Informative)
Re:I would start with Plex (Score:5, Funny)
I have two and almost rage-quit the game of life. How does one survive 8?
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Alcohol. LOTS of alcohol.
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Alcohol. LOTS of alcohol.
For the parents or kids? (asking for a friend)
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Yes.
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Either go with one, and spoil the kid rotten, or get at least 3. Two is the worst because it's always one or the other and you'll be accused of favoritism.
With three, you always have a 3rd alternative.
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I never had 3. Well, only for about 9 minutes or so, and then his twin was born.
And then I had 4, and what the heck, why not keep going at that point?
Back to the original topic some of my favorite memories a few years back were me and the six oldest dogpiling onto the couch Saturday mornings to watch cartoons I'd selected and downloaded. I still run us a playlist on Saturday mornings but the oldest kids are too big for us to fit on one couch together any more, which is a bit sad.
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Why not keep going? Over-population for one. Buy congratulations on being part of the problem that will give your kids' generation a shitty life.
rotfl.
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That's a bit weird.
Surely you would want to eat the favourite?
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Eight is enough.
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Re:I would start with Plex (Score:5, Funny)
Sounds like he got an A+. He even aced the extra credit.
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It's not the kids that need an entertainment channel
Re:I would start with Plex (Score:4, Funny)
Father of 8? - shit, did you miss a sex-ed class?
I think I've actually demonstrated that I have the hang of it pretty well, to tell you the truth, and I'm a good data point against the idea that caffeine reduces fertility.
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It is wrong! (Score:5, Funny)
Kodi + PseudoTV Live (Score:5, Informative)
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I'd recommend Kodi [kodi.tv] with the PsuedoTV Live [github.com] plugin, which lets you set up channels from your library with various rule sets to determine what is shown and when.
Exactly what I thought of as reading. PsuedoTVLive is pretty much exactly what he is describing.
I'll just recommend an OpenELEC box (I prefer on ODROID C2) for the KODI platform.
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Thanks for that info.
I haven't had any kind of TV service (not counting a useless basic cable package that came with my Internet access I didn't even use) in ten years.
I'm fine with this but it seems to completely blow my visiting relatives/inlaws minds. I may set this up just to make them more comfortable while they're visiting. My Kodi system is plenty full of movies. I may have to get more TV.....
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Raspberry PI is your answer. (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Raspberry PI is your answer. (Score:5, Interesting)
It is easier than debugging and fixing the problem.
Like with a lot of home projects, our line for good enough is much lower then if we were to get it professionally done.
Normally with software development.
5% of the time is to get the product to do the job the specs says it needs to do. the other 95% Is to get it to run reliably, deal with crazy user inputs, be flexible enough to maintain, get the UI to look nice...
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More bonus points, with plex pass you can set up users with a pin and set content rating restrictions on each user, no more manually setting up libraries!
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You can do the same with Emby
I didn't make a television channel... (Score:5, Insightful)
I got a media center, put all the acceptable / 'parent-approved' stuff in a network share, and then gave the media center the credentials for that share - and NOT the shares with the more adult stuff on them.
It didn't take long for them to figure out how to turn on the box, navigate to their share, and select a file. Kids aren't dumb, they're ignorant... and they have nothing else to do but learn so they're pretty good at it if you give them even half a chance (and don't just do it for them when they whine).
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This is the best way: minimum work for parents, best workout for kids.
Overkill (Score:2)
Put the stuff on a USB stick and stick in in your TV.
Limit (Score:2)
I think that, maybe, the OP wants to stream a playlist *once* then stop. My kids would watch their favorite shows over and over again. So the playlist needs a tiny bit of intelligence.
Only way I can think to do this, without hacking up a custom Plex plugin, would be setting up a time limit. Maybe a tinydlna server brought up by a cron job, then another job that kills it after two hours or so?
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Buffalo LinkStations are pretty inexpensive, offer DLNA/Samba/AFP and are configured with a cron job for putting it to sleep as well as auto-sleep. It can be awakened again by pushing a button the chassis though, so don't ever reveal that feature, or put the device on your LAN but in a physically inaccessible location.
XBMC (Score:1)
No (Score:5, Funny)
Mr Rogers then Sesame Street then grandparents' story-time, then two hand-picked cartoons
I will not be complicit to this child abuse.
Re: What is the goal? (Score:1)
I find it amusing that one of my friend tries to lock down his kids phones so they don't play too much. So far they've found at least the ways around the nanny software. I on the other hand just told my kids that they are allowed to play a certain amount a day and if they go over the limit, they'll lose phone privileges for a certain number of days. They learned pretty fast, they have a clear set of rules which they can choose to break off they want and, incredibly even to me, they report their own infracti
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Well the goal is to keep the kids occupied in the morning to keep them out of their hair while they can get the morning stuff done. Back in the olden days, we would use this time to have the kids, bring in firewood, feed the animals, take care of the younger kids, all the stuff that today would be considered abuse, and unsafe child conditions.
Also there is value in knowing about trade offs. If you are going to watch further or go pee, you can't have it both ways. Did the kid refuse to try to pee before the
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Is the goal to give your kids the most similar experience to growing up with a tv that you had? Why can't they pause grand parents story time if they have to pee? Because you didn't have time shifting when you were a kid? What's next, as teenagers are you going to scoff at them for texting their friends, and then tell your friends how the lost art of rambling in voice calls is a sign of the end times? I'm trying to be constructive here, your kids have access to technology that you didn't have as a kid, and that is a good thing. Why not just let them use a 5 year old cell phone with the Kodi/xbmc app to control a raspberry pi full of Mr Rogers episodes, and have enough faith in them that they won't spend the next 48 hours binge watching it like it won't be there tomorrow?
Submitter here. My children are aged 2, 2 and 4. For the past year, the eldest has had an ipad with Mr Rogers, Sesame Street, grandparents, and a few cartoons. She has chosen to ignore everything apart from the cartoons, and she gravitates towards the shallowest ones, the "candy".
More generally, children of these ages are all about testing limits, and they do so constantly. This is a good and normal and essential part of childhood development. I work hard to make sure that the limits they test are good cons
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On the other hand, kids crave, and need, the ability to make choices. Giving them a slate of approved shows, and letting them choose, even if the constantly choose *your* least favourite, is a good thing. Railroading into the idea that they must consume whatever media is placed in front of them is, to my mind, not a good idea.
So, give them a choice of what media to watch. It's harmless, it lets them exercise autonomy in something that's important to them, but not going to cause anybody any harm, and if y
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If the kid can turn on the TV they can fire up Plex and pick the shows they want. I think you need the Plexpass if you want users with limited libraries etc. but it's what $5 a month or $150 for a lifetime one these days (mine was a lot less).
My three year old niece can do it, even shows Grandma when she is doing it wrong; lots of "no Grandma you need to push that button". Funny really I think it's because at Grandma's they are not allowed to put the TV unless Grandma permits it.
My nephew and niece seem to
Sounds cool (Score:5, Funny)
How much would a 30 second spot right after Mr. Rogers cost me?
Ecploration (Score:3)
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For one thing, it imposes a schedule. You don't have to be worried about the kids waking you up at 7:02 if they'd be missing a favorite show. It also imposes a limit on how long they want to watfch TV without making it an arbitrary (or obvious) rule. For another, studies have show that for educational television, binging a show results in less education.
Also, it will let the parents know enough about what their kid watched on any given day to be prepared. "Oh, they watched the Sesame Street about rainbo
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Bad parent! (Score:2, Offtopic)
Ask any /. member who's not a parent - they'll tell you that what you're doing is BAD parenting!
You need to be watching every second of every minute of what your kids are doing. What if one of the kids uses the remote to change the channel? You need to make a custom remote for them that only has one button. What if your kids have a question about something they're watching, or oh my gosh, what if they misunderstand something or misinterpret something? You have to be right there, hovering over their shou
Re:Bad parent! (Score:4)
The best part is that - thanks to the information age - there are a lot of parents who believe that, too. I've no idea how they do it, I simply can't watch my kids constantly.
Anyway, it ultimately leads to full-grown people who can't function without mom and dad holding their hand. As a parent, that's not the kind of result you should be looking for.
BBC Cbeebies (Score:5, Informative)
I've gotta say, the BBC have done this for me/us. Cbeebies is great for kids from about 2 until about 8-9-10 or so. The iPlayer Kids app is also an excellent idea - basically, you can load that up on an tablet and let them loose on making their own choices, sharing with siblings and whatnot and know that 100% they won't see any adverts for shit toys you don't want to have to buy or even have to deal with explaining to your kids, and they also won't see anything other than fairly reasonable content with some semblance of education thrown in.
I realise we shouldn't leave kids unattended with a tablet or a TV (which we don't), but even the likes of YouTube, TinyPop, NicJR, and even Netflix etc can't get close to what the BBC offers (mostly because those sources are heavily Americanised, so have 'wrong' accents and words for stuff, or just have really low-quality content).
As for what you can do yourself, getting the content is of course the hard part. Playing content directly on a tablet, or via a Kodi media client on a TV or whatever is pretty easy (again, it means your kids can choose what they want to watch, within your 'walled garden'). Getting enough variety and keeping up with whatever-the-other-kids-at-school are watching is the hard part - and trying to integrate streaming services into one usable entity is just futile.
Kill your (kids) television (Score:1, Insightful)
Best thing my father ever did was sell the TV set, back in the 80s. Forced us kids to go and make our own entertainment, and I think I had a much more enjoyable youth as a result.
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The XY problem (Score:2)
I believe sg_oneill has discovered what he thinks is an XY problem [stackexchange.com] and is trying to solve the underlying root issue.
I disagree (Score:2)
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Best thing my father ever did was sell the TV set, back in the 80s. Forced us kids to go and make our own entertainment, and I think I had a much more enjoyable youth as a result.
Submitter here. Indeed we don't have a TV - only an iPad. I mostly sympathize with you. But I think there's good educational content to Mr Rogers and Sesame Street that I don't want to keep them from. I also think that a media-free child today would struggle to relate in the playground.
Also what I see is that with my three kids (aged 2, 2, 4), they get into battles about who holds the iPad. They're too young to resolve this themselves. Also the youngest are at an age where they still need parents to help ma
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We had a TV when I was growing up in the 70's - and we went outside and made our own entertainment. TV isn't the problem.
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No, its a reference to my actual name.
Using BeYourKid to create my safe YT collection (Score:1)
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How about command line? (Score:2)
If the answer is yes you should be able to do a one liner bash script that plays the files in sequence fullscreen in a video player.
Actually come to think of it you could make a .m3u playlist and then load it into VLC.
The problem is, kids being kids, assuming they're smart enough they'll inevitably work out some way to turn the TV back onto broadcast and watch Bill Nye and the like.
Thus any sufficiently smart kids must also fall prey to the degeneracy of modern pop culture.
Another aphorism occured to me. Th
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Buy a VCR (Score:2)
Plex or Synology or QNAP or ... (Score:2)
Books (Score:3)
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Or you could just leave some good books for them. (There is one in every crowd, and today, I am the one.)
Submitter here. We have loads of good books. My kids (aged 2, 2, and 4) will happily sit engrossed in their favorite story books for up to 30 minutes, despite not being able to read a word. They recite many of them by heart. But the youngest aren't yet able to be left unsupervised with soft-page books because they rip the pages, and hard-page books are too immature for them at this stage.
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Hi submitter, first poster here. I'm going to chime in on this one. Audio books. I listen to al of audio books on the way to work. I would drop my kids off at school and we would listen to audio books on the way there and sometimes at home at night. This started when they where in kindergarten.
Why build something? (Score:3)
Netflix has a kids section, as does Hulu. Amazon has pretty solid selection by age group too. At least on FireTV - you can lock most things down with pin access. I've got a 5 and 7 year old that can turn on the TV themselves and watch assorted kid stuff. The trick is they know they need to ask first, and that we as parents are in control of the TV. We say when it needs to be turned off. It's perfect for when we need an extra hour or so in the morning, or as we get ready and the kids have woken up a bit too early.
It's certainly not perfect since our kids can somehow find the most god awful shows in the mix. It's not that they are age inappropriate, they just kill braincells for any adult in a 10 mile radius.
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I'm following this with interest. Right now the 5yo can't even turn on the TV because it's controlled from a remote switch hung where he can't reach it, but the prospect of sleeping past 6.30/7am on weekends is most intriguing.
If you're using a Roku, there's no way to stop them switching profiles to watch whatever they want. Or channels.
Also, Amazon/Netflix's definition of things categorized as "suitable for children" is drastically different from mine. Some are too scary, others too violent, and some ju
Hotel Interface (Score:2)
You should be able to fully control the device via the hotel interface system available on many TVs. You can brute-force the same thing with an IR Blaster covering the IR receiver on the TV. A little bit of scripting on a Raspberry Pi to glue it all together and you are done.
Possible solution (Score:2)
How about a VLC Playlist, a cron job to start VLC, and an Amazon "RCA Compact RF Modulator" http://amzn.to/2FnqowT [amzn.to] (Amazon Link) to pipe the output from composite to Coax.
Long live channel 3!
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My kids watched their 333Ã--480 Barney VHS tape enough times for the image quality to degrade to roughly half that. ... Litte kids don't care. If they do, connect it to a monitor instead of the RF converter.
...and then nothing for the rest of the day (Score:2)
I think the OP didn't highlight and bold and triple-underline the most important part of the design -- the not showing anything more. He's looking for a solution that turns off after use.
I'm weary of media servers and the like, only because they are designed for unfettered access. Similarly, while the easiest solution is the usb stick in the modern tvision, there's no way to stop them from watching repeatedly.
What about something much much simpler.
Any old computer. No keyboard. Run a script at startup (
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>I think the OP didn't highlight and bold and triple-underline the most important part of the design -- the not showing anything more. He's looking for a solution that turns off after use.
I know I overlooked it before I responded. I like the idea of a home 'television channel' for kids. Maybe something that plays random files from folders that are chosen by schedule..
And you know what else? I'd love it to detect good points to insert homebrew ads (based on how much time has passed and finding a scene
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Avoiding the whole quagmire whether or not he SHOULD do this; but rather address technical feasibility of if he wanted to I think all of the suggestions above, about media servers etc. are all over thinking it.
If the media files are already hosted online, why go through all of the trouble of cron jobs, or other messy solutions when this was already solved some time ago with the advent of m3u files: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Fire up vi, emacs (insert your text editor of choice) and curate your l
Get rid of the thing (Score:3)
If this is an issue at all, a parent is well advised to cancel their cable subscription entirely.
If an adult can't go on living without the television shows they want to watch, then why on earth should they expect their kids to?
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If this is an issue at all, a parent is well advised to cancel their cable subscription entirely.
And then use what for Internet? Some cable ISPs offer only the slowest peak speeds and the lowest monthly caps to subscribers who do not bundle TV.
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I'm a parent as well... my kids are grown and all moved out now, but I was always willing to make personal sacrifices if it meant raising them to be decent and mature human beings. If that meant selling the TV or getting rid of cable, I'd do it. If that meant slower internet speeds, or even if it meant I'd have to go back to dialup*, I'd do that too.
But you can sure as hell bet I'd be bitching to the cable company for what I'd consider unfair treatment.
*We did that for a while at our house, when on
Raspberry Pi and Kodi (Score:2)
Go Analogue (Score:2)
Hire a 14-year old ... (Score:2)
... babysitter.
Be An Active Parent (Score:1)
As a single parent father, my 12 year old doesn't even want to watch TV. She is in two bands, one choir and is currently in my practice Forex account.
In a couple years I might consider handing over the keys to daytime trading whilst I semi-retire and take over the EMEA market hours.
If your child isn't earning you a million a year, you've done something wrong.
This would work and costs nothing (Score:1)
Netflix Flixtape is close (Score:1)
My House (Score:1)
Hello? (Score:1)
You seem to have forgotten to schedule ads for Unhappy meals etc.
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That's what'll get the OP McSWATed and dragged off to McJail to become a McBitch. The very idea of not ramming profit-making adverts into the childs eyes from the womb is so un-American that probably it would be best to exterminate the family back to the biblically approved seventh generation. How is the programme of installing advertising screens into wombs going? I heard they got the dates of eye and visual cortex development figured out, so we know when to
Media Tank (Score:1)
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Remember "hammertime!"?