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Ask Slashdot: How Can I Build a Private TV Channel For My Kids?
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.
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.
I read at +2. If your post doesn't reach that level I will not see or respond to it.
The unfair and unconstitutional infringement of infant's right to information will be strongly opposed by the Alliance of American Advertisers Astroturf Organization.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
I'd recommend Kodi with the PsuedoTV Live plugin, which lets you set up channels from your library with various rule sets to determine what is shown and when.
I did something similar with a Raspberry Pi, a simple BASH script, and OMXPlayer. I loaded tons of old 80's Christmas shows/movies on a USB thumb drive and plugged it into an old 13" crt television. The Pi played all my shows 24 hours a day during the xmas season. Whenever I turned the TV on, I could enjoy an old classic. I did have to reboot the Pi once a day but other than that it works perfectly as a homemade tv station.
I have a PC set up as a media server and it is running Plex. I have 4 libraries - Children, Movies, TV and Sci Fi. I have taught my kids that everything on Children is good to go but the other libraries need a parents approval.
On the TV I have both a Tivo and an Amazon Fire - both of which have Plex software loaded into them.
Done and done.
Bonus points - with a Plex Pass you can configure Plex to be accessabile outside your home network. I watch stuff from my own libraries from outside the house all the time.
(Plex is free - but Plex Pass gets it outside your home network)
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).
The easier way is to simply record yourself doing shit, then connecting your laptop or mobilephone to the TV..... and click play.
The content would be shit, but hey itâ(TM)s a private tv channel that nobody can assess!
Actually you can just click play on some random YouTube content and skip the recording your own content part.....itâ(TM)s still your own curated private channel.... itâ(TM)s also called a private playlist
Put the stuff on a USB stick and stick in in your TV.
Make a media center PC with XBMC installed on it, load the shows and movies up on there.
VLC can playback a file (or playlist) over a network to a multicast or unicast address. Combine this with a bit of shell scripting to build a schedule each day and create a playlist file and it should do the job. With multicast playback you can do SAP announcements which any VLC client browsing the network can find and play. You could even do multiple "channels" this way. A Roku, Raspberry Pi, FireTV stick, Android or iOS tablet and possibly Chromecast can run VLC and act as a client for this.
See https://wiki.videolan.org/Documentation:Streaming_HowTo/Advanced_streaming_with_samples,_multiple_files_streaming,_using_multicast_in_streaming/ for some documentation on this.
Mr Rogers then Sesame Street then grandparents' story-time, then two hand-picked cartoons
I will not be complicit to this child abuse.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
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?
I think you're overthinking the solution a little bit. If you want to run mp4 video content in a loop constantly (which is basically what a TV channel is) then dump all of your videos in a folder on a PC and run them all using MPC-HC/VLC/.
If the television is only hooked up to a PC in another room then there is zero chance of your kids making their way to other content.
This would be more difficult to accomplish with a chromecast, since it would have to stream said video via DLNA. Best way is run run HDMI through a wall on a PC with small form factor that runs quietly. Mirror the screen on a 2nd display so that you can adjust the content without having to be physically present in the room.
Just leave a VHS tape in the player with those shows on it. Problem solved!
I understand wanting to curate the content your young children consume, but do you need to determine the order in which they should consume it?
The easiest solution would seem to be to just host the appropriate files on a NAS or whatever and turn the service off whenever you don't want the children to be able to watch it. Even my old-ish Samsung TV handles this perfectly via DLNA, but newer TVs support a number of different protocols that you might want to use instead. With a DLNA service on a NAS, my children can stream any content on it from any tablet, phone, or TV in the house.
it's gross.
How much would a 30 second spot right after Mr. Rogers cost me?
Do you have ESP?
Why do the shows have to play in order? That was something we put up with when we were kids because we had no choice. Dump a bunch of kids shows in a folder, put it in a Kodi library and let your kids explore on their own.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
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 shoulders, to make sure they don't turn into terrible people. What if your neighbor sneaks into your house and slips some adult-related content onto your flash drive? You wouldn't want to subject your kids to that, and we all know how many predators there are hiding in every bush and just waiting to permanently warp the minds of your precious young children.
Better yet, why are you letting your kids watch electronics at all? We all know that's the tool of the devil, used to churn out lazy, mindless morons who don't contribute to society, or worse yet, watch too much PBS and become SJWs. Why not make your kids read a book? But not the wrong books, you should look over their shoulders and read every page they're reading, to make sure they're not putting a "My Little Ponies" book cover over a book with more salacious themes. But wait, why are you letting your kids have any entertainment time at all? As a parent, you should be supervising your children 24/7, and you need to make sure they're doing something productive like homework all the time. As any non-parent /. member, they'll tell you how to do it.
Just ease them into it by allowing them to watch *cartoon* porn first.
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?
My Other Computer Is A Data General Nova III.
Set up a red5 server then you can link to this in several ways depending on available kit. Easssssssy
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.
Don't sleep in. Go ride a bike in a park.
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.
Excuse the Unicode crap in my posts. That's an apostrophe, and slashdot is busted.
I am using app.beyourkid.com to make my own video collection. Then by downloading the BeYourKid app I am sure that my kid will only see videos from that collection without receiving any weird recommendations by YouTube. It’s pretty fun because I can also find new and safe content in the ‘Safe Lists’ tab, or search for my YouTube favorites and add them in personal collection!
Download VLC Media player and setup a playlist on a network share.
Start a task right at 7:00am that will start VLC and load the play list. When the kids turn the TV on, it will already be playing the videos of your choice.
You can always set VLC to repeat the playlist so it goes all day long.
Nathan
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. The reasonable man changes his home to deal with the degeneracy of modern pop culture. The unreasonable man changes the degeneracy of modern pop culture in order to protect his home. Therefore all progress depends on the later.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
Considering that PBS hasn't ever released a set of tapes/DVDs/blu-rays of Mister Rodgers Neighborhood....we're going to help this guy show his kids pirated stuff?
Sounds like it.
Not have the TV as a babysitter. They just got up, no matter what time they went to bed. I could play with my lego or train or stay in bed if it was much earlier.
Wake up was 07:00 and before that you sleep.
The TV should not be seen as a babysitter.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
You can build a plex server with an external hard drive and an sbc (if you pre-encode the video so the sbc doesn't need to transcode) otherwise any old pc should do.
Put the media on the hard drive and serve it with the plex. Most smart tv's have a plex client and every set top box does.
problem solved
VHS tapes in the living room. good luck finding a player
Record a tape of those shows, and pop it in. Then all your kids have to do is hit "play". Sometimes old tech is better.
Pretty much any NAS has a media server now days, and pretty much every TV has some sort of player app. If not, a Roku stick is dirt cheap and works well. This one is easy, and there's so many options to make it, technically. The question, of course, comes down to ridiculous draconian licensing making it "illegal" to do so.
Or you could just leave some good books for them. (There is one in every crowd, and today, I am the one.)
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.
I made a Roku channel for myself (and family) and it's been chugging away for a handful of years with no maintenance required. I like that I have control over the interface. The pre-made components were pretty limited when I made it, so I was writing my own components for it and was working on an open-source library. (See https://bitbucket.org/stevenvi/skoobalon-roku-library, but don't use it, read on.) I had a pretty simple PHP page running on a local webserver that served up all the data for the channel.
Roku has since deprecated all the API components I was using, and are going to remove it from the firmware I think at the end of the year. So I'm going to have to block them on my network from auto-updating, otherwise they'll effectively be bricking my device for me. Doesn't leave me with a good taste in my mouth. I experimented with a FireTV since it looks like I'll have to be rewriting my channel anyways, but the interface there was beyond bloated with ads, and the remote barely worked, so I returned it.
Just some food for thought. I think that forcing all developers to rewrite their software on your platform is very unfriendly. I don't plan to purchase any more of their hardware for this reason.
While there are a lot of interesting suggestions, but why not drop a space computer through HDMI with just a massive VLC playlist to loop (and shuffle?) and hit play. Take off the keyboard/mouse and just set the TV to that input when you want them to watch.
I realize this doesn't answer some of the scheduling and lockdown concerns, but do you really care WHICH episode they are really watching? I feel like would make it more of a hassle to constantly have to schedule. I would take a hard look at your requirements and think about if you want to put that much time into not just solving this, but maintaining the solution.
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.
killing TV entirely deprives your kid of a shared experience with their peers. Kids do 'water cooler' talk same as adults do, they just do it on the playground instead. Shared experiences are a big part of how people socialize. I'm not saying they should share 8 hours of TV a day but don't throw it out entirely.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
How about a VLC Playlist, a cron job to start VLC, and an Amazon "RCA Compact RF Modulator" http://amzn.to/2FnqowT (Amazon Link) to pipe the output from composite to Coax.
Long live channel 3!
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 (batch, scripting host, local html file, whatever). Given a directory of hand-picked videos, play-a-video, delete-the-video (or rename or move or whatever), play-a-video, delete-a-video. A simple raspberry pi works just as well as a ten-thousand-dollar desktop.
That way, there's a limited number of your hand-picked files. They can only watch each once. No keyboard necessary. They can turn it off, walk away, turn it on again and continue from the last/next video (depending on when you rename the video, before or after starting to play it).
You'll have full control, and you can plug in a keyboard whenever you want. You can deposit another day of vids remotely -- FTP would seem to be the correctly named protocol, or the device can play the videos remotely from any network source.
So that's my recommendation. startup script, play, delete, play, delete, play, delete. Hell, you could just hard-code that script file with a time index into a local html file every day, and be done in five minutes.
Okay, new plan.
The device has nothing more than a web browser running on startup, with a home page of a local or local-ish html file. It plays the \\kidvid\video.mp4 in a simple tag. When the video ends (simple javascript event), it reloads the page.
Elsewhere, (or on the same device if you like), you script a javascript file that looks like this:
if time = 5am, copy \\allvid\mrrogers6.mp4 \\kidvid\video.mp4
if time = 5:22am, copy \\allvid\sesame283.mp4 \\kidvid\video.mp4
etc, etc, etc
You can easily add randomness, or schedule multiple days in-advance. They'll simply be able to watch video.mp4, and you'll simply be able to change what that is over time.
I think you can figure out the indian head interstitial on your own -- background-image comes to mind!
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?
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Buy one and get a hard drive. Then grab Noobs or BerryBoot and unpack it onto the SD card. When you turn it in, you will have a lot of operating system install options. Pick OpenELEC. This will basically to the Raspberry Pi into a Kodi box. With the hard drive, you can just add episodes as needed. No reason to pay and risk privacy for PBS shows. Matter of fact, I'm pretty show Kodi has a few PBS addons. Free and open source is the way to go. It also should have parental controls in the settings or password protection for things at the very least so if they turn it on while you're not around, you don't have to worry.
$30 ApkTek USB player, connect the approved daily flash drive.
Don't make this harder than it needs to be. Buy a cheap player. Copy over the stuff you want for the day. The player will play them back in order.
Unplug the TV when time is up or put it on a timer.
I have plex.
I have Kodi.
I have a Roku.
None of those or similar devices are suitable for children with wisely protective parents.
You could also get a $50 tablet and never put it on the wifi, load up the external MicroSD with the approved videos daily.
Get a VCR and record your shows to VHS. Let the kids handle the tapes.
You could give them an analogue TV set and use an RF modulator to broadcast a single channel on VHF. Then, in another room you could use a Raspberry PI with the composite out, or even a cheap DTV receiver with the ability to play the files in the usb drive in a loop. Retrocasting with a Raspberry PI
I believe sg_oneill has discovered what he thinks is an XY problem and is trying to solve the underlying root issue.
... babysitter.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
Sounds like someone just admitted to ripping CR material...
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.
It all comes down to what you already have. I'm running a few servers that do different things, so I have a few options.
Originally I had an HTPC running Windows 7 media center that worked great. But when we wanted to go to the room to watch a movie/TV show it didn't work out very well. Eventually I moved to Plex and ran that off my FreeBSD server. Plex is great, but without streaming to the TV it's pretty much the same as WMC7.
I got a Chromecast which was a big letdown and very underwhelming - didn't live up to the hype and was actually more of a hassle to use. Eventually I got around to trying Roku and found it to fit the bill. Now we have Roku's on every TV, and we're able to stream all my content to each TV in the home. I also purchased the lifetime membership so we have quite a few features and they continuously add more. As an added benefit we can also stream to all devices so our media is accessible on the go.
In Plex we have set up each person with their own account. There's an HTPC account that covers most media we allow on the main TV. Then in the kids accounts they only have access to either specified directories, and/or media that goes up to certain ratings (i.e. G, PG). Then for the adults they have unrestricted access to their accounts, but require a pin to access them which is easy enough to enter and doesn't add frustration. So I can have all of my media in one place, and Plex handles the rest.
In WMC7 what you could do is specify one directory to be what is allowed to be accessed. And then on Friday night or whenever you want to update the videos, just copy them into that directory so when the kids wake up and turn everything on, that's all they'll have access to.
I should mention I also have a Logitech Harmony universal remote control, so that helps make it easy (usually) on everyone to just push one button on the remote and everything but the HTPC turns on. Before the kids knew which button to push to turn on the HTPC, and then used a WMC remote to navigate to their media. But with Roku it's much easier since once the TV is turned on, they just move to Plex, select their account and all the media is available.
Good luck!
-S
Assuming you have a DVR, you can record on it some shows for the kids to watch, then unplug the cable input before you go to bed. When the kids wake up they will only have access to what is already on the DVR. When you wake up, plug in the cable and you're good to go. The downside is that nothing you have scheduled will record overnight. But it would work and costs nothing.
Itâ(TM)s broadcast over-the-air and home recoding was deemed a fair use back in the VCR era.
What piracy?
I did this with an Odroid-C2 (for the IR sensor) LibreELEC and a private share just for the kids. On the fileserver their share is populated with Symlinks to the movies in the main share, and their screens only access that share. Once the age-out, you just point their devices at the main-share.
This gives them the illusion of choice (autonomy) amongst pre-screened selections.
The Flixtape feature will let you build a "playlist" of up to six titles. Even include "cover art" for the list. It's not automated, you'll have to build the list yourself first... but at least it would play through up to six episodes of whatever you want in the right order. I like the idea of a virtual channel too. Pick the shows I want, in the order I want... each day they just "advance" by one episode per show.
Books really do work great for kids. Take them to the library on Saturday, have them pick out books for the week (with your help) and then they're free to go through them however they want.
I recorded with an analog capture card on Linux and then an El Gato Eye TV on my mac. Used AVIDemux and then later Quicktime pro the remove all of the commercials from every episode of every show I recorded. Back in the early 2000s that was pretty serious time consuming work. Bolstered the collection with torrents and Ebay purchased full series of shows I grew up with. Used a bash script to randomize shows in numerical order interspersed with stuff like school house rock and time for timer so there was educational value. Started with DVDs played in an old G4 Mac tower attached to the CRT TV. Moved to VLC and m3u files served over the network from a NAS played on a Hackintosh. Kids called it "Dad TV" and they basically never saw a commercial or anything not approved until they were in 8th Grade.
I have Kodi installed on my PC in my room... (Windows 10) Hooked up to my TV (HDMI), with this I run a UPNP server through Kodi - (Kodi has the capability built in) - UPNP allows for computers using Kodi (or other UPNP players) that are hooked up online through the same network... to share audio and video media. Then in the kids room I hook up the computer to the TV and run Kodi. then from there I can control what I want in the library the children can view. In my room I have movies and shows they cannot watch, in their room I limit it to only what they can watch. My 6 year old knows what to do when I tell him that I have added movies and shows to Kodi.... He goes and opens the Kodi app on the windows based PC hooked up to his TV It is not a channel, but it is something that might work for you.
Turn off the idiot box and give them some books.
If they can't read, get your lazy ass out of bed and teach them.
You seem to have forgotten to schedule ads for Unhappy meals etc.
Requiem for the American Dream
if we could tell kodi to auto-login a certain user @ certain time we could then have only certain samba shares available per that logged-in user.
the samba shares would hold the files for pre-12pm auto-logins, e.g. only kids stuff.
also kodi can be set to auto-play-next file.
but how to auto-login depending on time of day?
Install a media tank with what you want on it and password lock out the cable box. Job Done!
NRRPT/RCT
but with that won't they develop a fear of tentacles?