[photon]

I have a friend with MS so he can't do things like use a remote anymore. Watching TV is one of his main activities, and he used to watch movies (has quite a large collection) but he doesn't anymore just because the care facility he's in the staff don't really know how to deal with the various remotes and in the past after he watched a movie he'd be left without the TV until I or someone could go over and get things back and running.

I had to replace his TV as the old one was getting weird artifacts, and was a bit worried as it kept defaulting to the smart TV menu after powering on when I wanted to just default to HDMI1.. otherwise any time the power went out he'd be stuck looking at the menu! I finally found an option for it but was worried for a bit.

Anyway back to the movies. I got a small HDMI switch with a remote but even that seems to be too hard for the staff, and he doesn't understand the stuff well enough either to just tell them what button to push on which remote. So he doesn't use it.

I've tried to convince him to try a FireTV with an IR setup so he could control everything by voice, but he hasn't wanted to and to be honest the MS has him slurring his speech quite a bit so not sure it would even work. Plus the newer cable boxes don't even work on IR anymore so if he ever had to get the cable box replaced he'd be hooped.

What I really want is a way that putting in a blu-ray and hitting play results in a movie on the TV, and then ejecting the disc results in the cable TV coming back. Probably not possible? I guess 2nd best would be some kind of auto HDMI switch that would switch to the blu-ray when it powers on and then switches back when it powers off? Not sure if that works that way.

Or is there a soundbar that might do something like that?