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Comment by bigfatfrock | Hacker News Reader

Amazing write up and work in general putting this together - this is such an ideal form of the word "hack" in its incredibly low cost, durability, and usefulness.

I was staggered when I saw your build cost list - I know ESPs are in the realm of "Cheap AF" but all of those NFC cards also for $9?! This is one of the few reasons I would shop Alibaba! We're talking around $15 total for the full NFC setup if you can print/rig yourself a case! (yes, of course, another $X for screens, sound etc)

I have run into such a crazy amount of cool hacky kid tech in the past couple of days for some reason (this and Makey Makey), and am so lucky to have done so. I can't wait to outfit my kids with this, it is going to blow their minds.

I want to hook it up to Jellyfish because I feel Plex is total marketing trash these days but as soon as I can get time I am all over this.

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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...

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?

You don’t have kids do you?

They leave the last disc laying on the TV cabinet. It never, ever goes back in the box. I found three stacked at one point, and I think one disc just outright disappeared and we had to get a new one. It wasn’t until the discs started skipping that the kids even thought about taking care of them.

Sooo many forum postings of parents lamented the loss of VHS when DVDs and Blu rays took over because of the kid factor. I saw a lot of people backing up their discs and giving their kids the duplicates because of the cost of (especially Disney) films. I also think slot-load (rare for disk players) is a lot more durable than tray-load for kids.

Backing up is the way, disks should be cheap! That’s the whole point of them

I for one don't own a blu-ray anymore and really don't want to - they feel to me like LaserDiscs or BetaMax at this point! :)

Plus, to fathom a three-year-old-destroyer-of-property handling your blu-ray disc collection, I shudder! They are great frisbees, and coasters, and etc.

If I even still owned blu-rays I might consider ripping them and then converting to this just to avoid the above mentioned pain.

I think that the fragility of Blu-Rays is a great way to teach a kid responsibility. You only let your kid have access to their Blu-Rays and if they scratch them or break them it's over - no more movie. They'll learn after they break a few.

My kids did not learn, perhaps because new kids kept coming to learn the lesson. And they generally can't connect a non-working disc to a specific act. Instead, a disc stops working after dozens of cumulative actions. We never replaced any broken discs either, and just slowly saw our collection dwindle from 20 working discs to something like 2.

My favorite example was the kids using dvds as roller skates to slide around the room.

> I would probably stick with Blu-ray approach?

Kids, little ones especially, are quite rough on discs. That's if they even make it back into the case!

If you search more you can cut price by half

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