I probably need to read Quasi’s blog to find out if I’m being P. un-C., but my MIL is 85 and has severe dementia. Her big love is to watch her movies. She has some musicals that she watches over and over. The problem is she can no longer figure out how to run the “machines” that show them so I’m running over constantly to magically fix things (usually involves hitting the Play button).
My wife’s brother found several on DVD, but she couldn’t navigate the menus, so he recorded them to VHS. This worked for a while except she didn’t understand the concept of rewinding so I would spend an hour or so every few days “fixing” her tapes. I got the bright idea that for Christmas I’d get her a DVD player (the simplest I could find) and copy the movies to DVD without any of the menu options… put it in and it plays. Some I couldn’t copy due to protection, but several worked fine. I put three big color coded signs with the words Open, Play, and Stop pointing to the only three buttons on the player. Unfortunately it is still too complecated. I will ask her “if you want to PLAY a movie which button will you push?” She can’t get it. The idea of if it is at the end and not moving, hit stop twice and it resets to the beginning is not even a possibility. We are called in tears more often than not that her “movies are broken” and we hope to find something even simpler.
I’m thinking I can get an iPod or even a cheap desktop that we can just put them on a continuous loop. She won’t have any selection, but I don’t think that will matter that much. Can anyone make any suggestions I may not be considering? We have several movies that we can’t copy and I’m not looking for illegal ways to get around that, just would like to give her a couple more options. If it helps, the ones she loves are New Moon, Rose Marie, Naughty Marietta, Girls of the Golden West, May Pole, and others of that type. I guess I’ll add on a question of if anyone knows where to get similar movies. We also have Oklahoma and Sound of Music which I know she would like but can’t get past the protection.
I have no idea what to suggest Spud, but I just wanted to chime in and say what a considerate chap you are for even thinking about ways to help your MIL. It’s the simple things that mean so much AND say much about the nature of the person.
Spud, what a great son-in-law you are. One solution, similar to what you mentioned, would be to make DVDs with all the movies on them (if you slightly compress the files, you could fit multiple movies on one disk) and have it so they automatically play, one after the other. I may be able to help you with this, I will send you a PM…
Is she living by herself? I would be seriously worried about her taking care of her other needs like operating the stove and things of that nature if she can’t figure out how to push play on a DVD remote. I’m not at all being sarcastic, I would really be scared of her living alone.
One of the things they have found with patients who have any form of dementia is that things from the past are calming - just like the old films you are showing.
Something else you might consider is on some cable networks, they have music channels with nothing but songs from the 40’s (or other decades) that might be nice to simply play in the background. Those are non-stop, 24/7.
I don’t have my VCR hooked up anymore, but I recall it was a simple process to set the tape to play continuously. At the end of the tape, it would simply re-wind and start over again…and if you taped a few movies in the very slow format, that might be an option where she wouldn’t have to do anything and have a few films play back to back.
Hope this helps, and I think what you are doing is excellent!
Yeah you can get movies down to about 800mb (people do this a lot to make VCDs) and put them all on one DVD. You can also use the DivX codec (or even Xvid, I think) and get a player that plays DivX (just google “divx dvd player”) so it’s just playing AVI files and not actual DVD files - which take up more space.
Although, I’m not sure if you can make those auto-play - nyctea might have the answer for that.
I’m sure nyctea will help with this, but encoding them so that they can be put in a playlist with repeat, and doing this all on a windows PC might be the route to go…and just lock up the PC so that all it does is play the movie files over and over…
you might try posting a question in General Questions to get more technical answers…post something like “how do I play movies in an endless loop” or “how do I play movies automatically” or something. There must be a way that advertisers do it…you know when you go to a big home or auto show or something and there are always those ads that play over and over?
An ipod might not be a bad idea though…can you make a playlist of movies like you can with music? Then you can just program the play list to repeat.
I think the answer would be to get a reasonably cheap desktop, load it with itunes, buy the movies/rip the movies into the hard drive. Set prefs to replay and shuffle and set the computer itself to never turn anything off, so it runs 24 hours a day.
Thanks to everyone for the kind words and great ideas. I’ve also recieved my first ever PM’s with other good ideas and very generous offers. I’m just getting home for the first time today so it may take me a little while to digest everything, but I will look into all of the options suggested.
For anyone who is concerned for her safety, she has been in assisted living for the past several years so she is well cared for. For some reason though they don’t seem to think that the fact that her movies aren’t playing is reason enough to drop everything and send someone to her apartment. She also has a nice TV in the living room that is tuned to Turner Classic Movies pretty much 24/7, but it is the same old musicals that she wants to view whenever she is in her bedroom. She sometimes asks why she can’t get “new” ones, but I got her the comedy “Road to Bali” which I thought she would love because she has been to Bali many times but she hates it because it isn’t one of the ones she is used to, and I guess she wants the singing. I don’t know anything about movies from this era so have no clue what would be similar.
I had gone with the individual DVD option because I wanted to be able to give her the choice, but now I think I have to just let them play in whichever order they come up.
Thanks again to everyone… it is hard watching a once very adventurous woman slowly degrade to where she is now. Good news is she still has some very good days and it makes me happy to help however I can to make those as frequent as posible. I just got the official word today (it wasn’t a surprise) that my Dad has Alzhiemer’s (sp?.. don’t really feel like looking it up now… sorry), but he is 600 miles away so my Sister gets to share the experience now.
Please let us know how you make this work; I think my MIL would enjoy something similar. One thing we found she liked was buying her one of those automatic electronic picture frames that display scanned pictures on an endless loop - we scanned dozens of old family pictures for her from her youth and she’s really enjoyed it. It also serves as a great ‘conversation starter’ for her - her memory for current things is awful, but as is typical for Alzheimer’s dementia in the mid stages her memory for her childhood is very good. If things are getting difficult we can draw her attention to whatever picture is displaying and she can talk at length about the people in it and not feel frustrated and lost - and we get to hear her family memories, which I fear will be gone all too soon.