Video Streaming for my Grandma?

[JRA]

Hi all, not even work-related but this seemed like the place to ask. Bear with me...

 

My grandma's been in a home and has dementia. I'm sure most of us have faced this or similar at some point, and I'm struggling a little with a project I'd planned for her. She doesn't really eat much, sleeps a lot, can't leave the bed and doesn't really enjoy ANYTHING except flowers and strawberries (so I bring those often and the room now looks like an orchid greenhouse!) However, she does occasionally complain of being bored, which is heartbreaking. I get there as often as possible for a bit (as do others from the family) but it's a drive away. I try for a few hours twice a week but more than usual it's only one visit a week with work being how it is. :/

 

She's always loved animals and kept fish, though an aquarium's impractical in the place she has. I had the great idea of setting up a Raspberry Pi to turn on during the day (staff have kindly agreed to turn it on and off if I write a short manual) which would stream one of a few live streams of aquariums etc from around the world to a massive telly we've got for her. That would at least be *something* and my dad, the staff and I agreed that'd be a cracking idea.

 

I'd settled on using VLC somehow, but all the streams I'm finding are YouTube streams, which it doesn't seem to want to do (at least it didn't in Ubuntu on this PC.)

 

Questions are, is the above the easiest way to do what I want even? Is there a better way of going about what I want?

 

Thanks from me and from the extended family for any help/suggestions at all!

[LeMarchand]

My commiserations. Dad has same problems but isn't (yet) in a home.

 

Depending on the severity of her memory problems, I'm wondering if just playing pre-recorded stuff might be easier. If you want live streams I know you can install Kodi on Pis and there's a YT addon which may be worth investigating: hide any extraneous stuff and just have links to the various streams?

[mavhc]

Try Streaming YouTube videos to my Raspberry Pi

 

You could wrap the command in a loop to restart if it fails, ssh in to change the url when needed

[Domino]

Youtube streams? Chromecast would be easiest I'd have thought

[JRA]

Thanks everyone for replying! Several things to try there and I'll get into those at the weekend.

 

Ur all great, cheers.

[Danp]

What about a Raspberry Pi with https://www.yodeck.com/ that way you can remotely programme it and push out the updates. Can set time banding too, one video in the morning, something else in the afternoon.