No one makes Blu-ray changers! Suggest an alternative.

[photon]

I have a friend with MS who lives in an assisted care facility, he's progressed enough where he doesn't have enough control to use a remote or a mouse or what-have-you.

He likes to watch movies during the night, he kept his VCR for a long time because it was easy for the people working at the facility to just hit eject on one movie and put in the next, have it autoplay, etc... When he switched to DVDs he had a carousel so he could put in 5 movies and have them auto-play throughout the night.

Now with Blu-rays that kind of thing doesn't exist anymore. The staff often aren't technical enough to switch movies for him during the night without accidentally turning off the speakers or switching off closed captioning or flipping the TV to antenna (all of which I've had to go to fix and more).

So I'm looking for any ideas to come up with something that's as close to fool-proof as the VCR was.

Assuming that I can rip the blu-rays (is that still possible? or is it hit and miss with some being unrippable?), maybe something like a media PC? Are there super simple interfaces for media PCs that I could create movie playlists and choosing the playlist would play each movie one after the other?

[Hockeyguy15]

Would some sort of streaming device with voice control work?

http://www.pcworld.com/article/30299...tore-apps.html

[photon]

He doesn't have Internet access, he's not really interested in getting it either; the extra cost isn't worth it to him. He doesn't like the idea of Netflix having only some movies too.

[Galakanokis]

My only thought would be to build him a small server with Plex of Kodi. Rip all of his media to the drives and let it go. Wouldn't cost all that much and should auto play. Might be a little more difficult to get running if it fails or turns off though.

Voice controlled netflix would pretty cool as well. Just saw your post about internet. A plex server might be the way to go. Be a bit of work to setup but not too hard.

[photon]

Speech activated may be interesting. He tried using it to write letters a while ago without much success as his speech is a tiny bit slurred, but maybe something simpler like voice activation for a library of music and movies might work better.

http://voxcommando.com/home/

[ken0042]

I'm sure you may have been down this road, but I found the following product. (Now discontinued of course)
https://esupport.sony.com/CA/p/model...dl=BDPCX7000ES

And online they seem to be going used for north of $1000. I wonder if Sony might still have something kicking around; especially given this kind of "feel good" potential.

[Galakanokis]

Originally Posted by ken0042

I'm sure you may have been down this road, but I found the following product. (Now discontinued of course)
https://esupport.sony.com/CA/p/model...dl=BDPCX7000ES

And online they seem to be going used for north of $1000. I wonder if Sony might still have something kicking around; especially given this kind of "feel good" potential.

Sent an email to my Sony rep to see if he can track something like this down. Bit of a stretch but worth a shot.

[photon]

Yeah I saw a few of those online, I guess I'll ask my friend to see if he'd want to spend that much, he'd probably buy two, he likes to have a backup of whatever it is ready in case it breaks. He's a little crazy that way, though I'd guess slowly losing control of your body would make you want to control your environment to reduce uncertainties more and more.

The only thing I don't know about those is can they be set to just autoplay the movies in order. I'll download the manual and check, thanks guys.

EDIT: Doesn't look like it

[DownhillGoat]

Originally Posted by photon

He's a little crazy that way,

The fact that he's trying to track down discontinued technology makes it seem less crazy.

[photon]

That's true, when he was still using a VCR it suddenly wasn't crazy when we had to switch to his backup when his failed and stores didn't sell them anymore. Bought a DVD-VCR combo then as a backup

[Wormius]

Can you even autoplay most blu rays? I know in my PS3 it's a little rigamorale each time.

It might be cheaper though to by a bunch of BluRay players and connect them into individual hdmi ports. Most TVs seem to come with like 5 now. And on the bright side if one breaks down, at least you are not totally hooped.

[DoubleF]

Originally Posted by Wormius

Can you even autoplay most blu rays? I know in my PS3 it's a little rigamorale each time.

It might be cheaper though to by a bunch of BluRay players and connect them into individual hdmi ports. Most TVs seem to come with like 5 now. And on the bright side if one breaks down, at least you are not totally hooped.

The problem is that the movies need to auto play in sequence and the friend can't use a remote or mouse and also won't have internet. I had thought of a similar idea with a PC with multiple disc drives as well as USB disc drive options attached to the PC, but I couldn't figure out how to play multiple files from different drives without the use of a remote or mouse.

I think ripping the blu ray might be photon's best bet. He can probably even do it at home and just bring a thumb drive to update the friend's computer library.

I am not sure of the available software options that might work, I've never had to play multiple files in sequence and retain settings, although I think VLC allowed me to skip to the next file in alphabetical order when I used to watch certain series which were housed in the same folder. I assume XBMC/KODI must have some type of function for this once ripped though?

[Wormius]

I guess if there was a way to down convert the videos' quality a little it might become possible to burn multiple movies onto a disc, it would at least take care of playing the movies in an episodic fashion.

Is there a caregiver who comes in and can set up a playlist for the day, if you can get the digital version of the movies that the person wants. I assume he is buying the movies and not borrowing them from the library?

The no internet is kind of too bad. The new Apple TVs have Siri, which might make control a little easier if they have some mobility to access and speak Siri commands.

[photon]

There is a caregiver, but I guess the technical ability ranges wildly from "can play the movies" to "don't let near the remote otherwise everything is suddenly in Spanish".

I'm thinking I'll make a VM and try out XBMC/KODI myself with the voice activation and with his use case in mind.

Plus I think I saw the auto-play option on some screen shots of Windows Blu-ray software, so I might be able to set that up on the HTPC as well; insert a blu-ray and it'll always auto-play the main title.

[opendoor]

Originally Posted by photon

Assuming that I can rip the blu-rays (is that still possible? or is it hit and miss with some being unrippable?), maybe something like a media PC? Are there super simple interfaces for media PCs that I could create movie playlists and choosing the playlist would play each movie one after the other?

I believe Plex can do exactly this. You rip the movies and then once the library is set up you can make a bunch of playlists and they'll play continuously. Plex can also be controlled with a remote so it likely wouldn't be too daunting for a non-tech savvy caregiver to start and stop it.

[Kjesse]

A laptop and plex solves all of these issues, and would be far superior than any 5 disc carousel.

Although you've said he doesn't want the internet, netflix also solves much of the issues. Shaw Go --- get an account, he can split it with other residents, and they have cheap unlimited wifi to connect to netflix or... better yet... plex.

Hell, a willing participant might even give him access to a plex server over the internet. Get him internet access, set up plex at your house, rip his blue rays, give him an account, and with any tablet or computer he will have access to everything repeating without having to have the pesky discs in some ancient machine.

I have relatives connected to my plex server. They use it more than Netflix and they're out of town.

[KTrain]

DVDs are still readily available. Why not continue to use a multi-DVD changer? They should be cheap to buy and DVDs are cheaper to buy than bluray?

[Barnes]

Plex also has an Amazon Alexa skill now so you can say "play what's On Deck", "play XYZ", etc.

Can be played through most Plex players like Roku and Apple TV. Unfortunately Echo needs an internet connection though.

The nice thing with the Echo is you could write skills to run scripts via voice to do things like restart the media server when things aren't working quite right.