One serious hurdle to making Ricky a solid video player is his ability to understand it's usage grammar. I'm not sure if this is the correct term in engineering design, but it seems correct to me. If there are menus he might get lost, if button presses don't quickly yield some change he gets frustrated or confused. Sometimes the same goes for his caregivers, be they family or helpful nursing staff. You can't blame someone who's confused at how to make a one-off prototype machine behave if it doesn't do what they expect other similar machines to do.

To that end I've tried to make simple, flat, simple interfaces in previous players, but sometimes prototyped machines do strange things when i've already driven home several hours away and that's a sad time for everyone. This time around I'm essentially outsourcing the video player design to an inexpensive no-name USB/SD card video player.

With some setting fiddling this player seems to be great for what I need. Autoplays anything plugged into it, outputs video to HDMI and audio to RCA plugs without a fuss. Only trick is some of the most needed buttons only live on the remote. Well balls....