[ewangr]

My middle daughter is multiply handicapped, and one of her great pleasures in life has been to shuffle through the large video tape collection she built over the years, and put them in her TV/VCR, watch a bit, sometimes fast forward or reverse to a specific bit, and then spit the sucker out to go to the next one.


As the above may indicate, because she has poor motor control she tends to be more than a little hard on her electronics, and today she busted the last TV/VCR we have been able to get for here.


Obviously I can look around for another one and hope to eak out a few more months, but I'm honestly tired of getting at least two of these a year.


So I'd like something that is fairly indestructible, but that gives her some measure of control over what she's watching.


Ideally I'd like a TV hooked up to a DVD carousel or a large HD with videos, that has some kind of touch panel control which could show a still from each of the hundreds of videos available on it, and then she could select the one to watch, and the control would change the display to let her fast forward, rewind, or return to the menu to select the next one she wants to watch.


I've tried both an iPod and a Nokia N800 with her, but the problem with both of those is the limited amount of memory, and the fact that neither of them is a dedicated video player. IOW, it's too easy for her to touch the screen in the wrong place or hit a button, and exit from the video player into some other app. Once that happens, it can take her forever to get back to what she wants to do since so many of these devices assume you have good seeing and can touch a small icon on the screen.


I'm kind of at my wits end here, and am hoping someone on here can point me to a good solution. Thanks!

 

[gooki]

If budget is no concern: http://www.trimble.com/yuma-rugged-tablet.shtml


It's a very rugged tablet PC that's designed for use outdoors on construction sites and by rough workers with fat fingers (or just wearing gloves).


Install a touch screen based media center, and the proceed to lock down windows. It has hard buttons as well and a good size screen, so can be made easy to use.


You can then have a NAS (network attached storage) device hooked up to a wireless access point and store as many movies as you could ever want. The added benefit is when travelling you just copy over some of her favorite movies to the built in 32gb of storage.


When you go to investigate the price I think you'll find its expensive, but if the alternative is replacing a destroyed player every 3 months or so, you'll quickly find your better off with something very rugged.


If you do decide such a device is worth the investment, and have trouble sourcing one give me a PM. I could probably assist with setting up the software as well.

 

[gooki]

Another, and much cheaper solution is to use a Networked Media Tank (popcornhour etc), and hide it in a closet. Then buy a IR extender and some long video cables. Finally buy a learning remote with big buttons.


NMT's usually accommodate internal HDDs, and can be expanded with either USB, or network attached storage solution.


This way she should only ever have to use the remote, which is hopefully much cheaper to replace.