Ask HN: Most interesting tech you built for just yourself?

I have a "TV channel" app running on a Raspberry Pi serving up local video content to a schedule I create.

The Pi has a 5TB hard drive attached with perhaps 1000 videos or so. The app has a schedule and plays the videos according to the schedule. It starts up in the morning, plays tele-courses, moves on to old TV shows, an afternoon movie, after school shows begin around 3:00 PM, a comedy show around dinner time, an evening movie, some late-night content, then the Indian head and "We Will Resume Broadcasting Tomorrow Morning...."

It fills dead airtime by choosing randomly among (literally) thousands of YouTube short clips I have on the drive — or showing a title card indicating when the next show begins.

Partly it's a fantasy — to have my own "channel" with my own scheduled content — my fantasy station.

Partly it serves to put on content I would otherwise not be inclined to pull up, double click and watch. It adds the serendipitous element to TV watching that I miss before streaming. The movie "Charly" (1968) just came on last night and I am sure I have not seen it since I was a teenager — had to stop what I was doing and watch a few scenes I recall vividly.

Today's lineup here: https://engineersneedart.com/UHF/

(Since the schedule is in JSON format, it was easy enough to make a web front end to display today's schedule.)

Engineer Sneed Art?

Look who is out of the loop on Sneed Art

Engineers Need Art

Formerly Chuck Art

What a great idea! Are you inclined to make a guide? If so, my old-school wife and myself would be grateful.

Otherwise, I will enjoy the fun of figuring it out for myself some day.

I'll open-source it when I get the embarrassing bugs worked out.

I have been thinking about doing exactly this for Saturday morning cartoons to stream anime to my PVM once I can figure out how to stream 480i from a modern device to RGB.

Would consider sharing how you set it up? I’d love to do something similar!

Engineers Need Art ^^

I wrote the app in Python for the Raspberry Pi. For video playback I am using the (now deprecated) omx player.

I tried using VLC instead for video playback (I think the more accepted way to play video from Python now) but when VLC completes showing a video there is a visible flash that I cannot figure out how to get rid of.

I should point out though that it doesn't "stream" — you'll have to find some other solution for that. The Pi is a dedicated "player" hooked to a dedicated TV that is always on, always showing what the Pi has to offer up.

I encourage you not to be embarrassed and to simply opensource it. To err is human; anyone giving you grief because of bugs doesn't deserve the effort you've put in. And opening it now could actually bring assistance in getting those bugs fixed, while simultaneously benefitting everyone who wants to do something similar but isn't sure where to start

For those interested in doing something similar there's a Plex add-on for making custom TV channels:

https://github.com/vexorian/dizquetv

Personally I want almost this. I want to rotate the TV shows my kids watch in the morning but I don't want to start part way through a show (the one part of the old analogue experience that I don't miss at all). Difficult to square that circle.

HDMI seems to be two way, my ps5 turns on automatically when I turn my TV on.

So you should be able to do something with that.

Oh, it's definitely possible. Software like dizquetv it must know when a new connection is made. But to add such a feature would require a lot of familiarization with their codebase and I don't currently have the time.

One day...

Ha! The Final Sacrifice is on tonight. That's one of the very best MST3K episodes.

I would love to do something like this for my kids. They're constantly begging to watch Youtube, which I limit pretty heavily. Something like this could allow me to stick some pre-approved videos into a queue, and maybe even make an allowance for a half-hour of some of the ... dumber stuff that they like at a certain time of the day. I could also slip in some Kurzgesagt, Mark Rober, content that they may not otherwise be that interested in to surreptitiously educate them ;)

That’s great! Like the idea of bringing serendipitous timing back. I see ‘Sounder’ is coming up, I recently got that soundtrack on vinyl!

I did this same sort of thing. My impetus was that I have tons of shows and movies to watch but I 1) don't necessarily want to binge every episode back to back and 2) my wide selection leads to choice paralysis. I mostly want some background noise rather than something I'm super engaged in.

I wrote a script to catalog all my shows/movies then another that reads a schedule and generates a daily playlist. My schedule has daily episodes of some shows and then weekly showings of others. I even put some network block bumpers between some shows and "upcoming schedule" clips.

The output of the scheduling script is just an m3u playlist. A cron job loads the day's playlist at midnight and it plays continuously during the day. There's no controls to pause or anything, if I miss something I miss it (by design). All the video content is stored on a 5TB drive plugged into the machine.

To complete the old school analog nature of the project I picked up a low power Hlly VHF video transmitter. I've got a small CRT TV in my office that I use during the day and I can pick up the signal on the TV in the living room. The project started on an RPi with VLC but it struggled on some videos I'd ripped from Bluray so I replaced it with a little fanless AMD box with an HDMI-RCA adapter. It sits in the garage and I can pick up the signal anywhere in the house.

The best part is apart from the setup it's proven to be pretty reliable. My next step is to make a schedule output like what you linked and maybe a web based UI to let me "change channels". For right now it does what I want with no real fuss and I always have something on that I like.

You might look at mpv instead of VLC. I had the same visible flash problem with VLC and mplayer but not with mpv. The other benefit of mpv I just (as in two days ago) found was I can use a loudness normalization audio filter to keep some shows from having blaring audio.

On my system I'm running mpv on top of OpenBox with compton for the compositor. It's been much smoother all around than VLC or mplayer on the same hardware (an AMD mini PC now replacing an RPi I had been using).

I won't speak for anyone else but sometimes "bugs" in more about process than code. I have a similar project as the GP and am not currently interested in open sourcing the project because there's a lot of bespoke elements and manual setup process. I don't want to have to make a README describing all the process steps that make my code actually useful.

For me, on my hardware, on my network, I've got a process that works. It's a non-zero amount of effort to generalize the description of that process.

This reminds me of the channels gamers get in Ready Player One. The main character used his channel to broadcast his favorite T.V. shows that other people could tune in and watch. This is a really cool!

All this is missing is an RF modulator and a very-low-power transmitter, just enough to reach throughout the house...

I did the same thing with my Chromecast, I made it play a random episode from my library, one after the other, so there was always something I liked on.

I've wanted to do this for quite some time! Do you serve it over you local network or is the Pi directly connected to the television?

Thank you! I will do that.

Very cool. This is exactly what I miss about old time TV; being able to catch a show by chance. I find it interesting that most of the time there's so much choice that I can't get the energy to pick one and stick with it. For a while there, I had 4 streaming services and never watched any of them. I just wasted my money.

Your comment led me to learn about Plex Plugins even though I've been using Plex for literally a decade!

Unfortunately they're removing support for all Plugins over time and have already eliminated ones that play content.

https://support.plex.tv/articles/categories/online-media-sou...

The protocol you're looking for is HDMI-CEC! Not a ton of good documentation out there, but hopefully this helps send you down a good path.

God. I wish they would stop shagging about with it content stuff (I don’t want their content, ever).

I would like a more logical arrangement of settings, remote setting of user resolutions (eg, please try native!).

Try out Jellyfin! It's an open source Plex replacement that doesn't mess with its users.

I switched a year ago after some dumb monetization change at Plex annoyed me enough and it's just been so much better.

Imagine a product just like Plex, but without all the shit Plex tries to pull all the time!

That is super cool!

I’ve wanted to do the m3u playlist thing for a long time, so I could create a HLS stream for each “channel”. Then family members could watch from any device.

Do houses no longer come with coax anymore? I broadcast to my house on an injected channel using an HDMI-to-RF modulator[0]

[0] https://www.provideoinstruments.com/hdmi-to-rf-modulator-con...

Wow. No idea this existed. I was about to set up a TV tuner with my Plex and pay $4.99 for the ability to broadcast live TV over Plex but see that JellyFin has this feature for free.

THANK YOU!

Engineers nèè Dart

If it were public, it would sadly fall afoul of copyright laws. Which is an absolute shame. Netflix and friends should definitely find a way to make this exist.

VLC has a setting to pause videos when they reach the end, instead of stopping them. Depending on how your system is set up, this might prevent the flashing.

Do you ever need to access your library remotely or from iOS devices?

That's the one killer app for Plex for me. I can get to my library when I'm on the road (music more than movies or TV).

Does Jellyfin do anything like this? Any other caveats if you've used both?

I like the idea of Jellyfin, but I had a lot of performance issues with Jellyfin and ended up having to switch back to Plex.

I'm using a seedbox and I can access it from anywhere, just fine. I'll be honest, I'm not sure about the implementation details, but I'm pretty sure it's done via a reverse proxy like so: https://jellyfin.org/docs/general/networking/caddy/

What kind of performance issues? I haven't experienced anything like that personally

Thanks for sharing! I'm reading the docs but was curious to also hear some first-hand experiences..