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1901 points l2silver | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.205s | source

Maybe you've created your own AR program for wearables that shows the definition of a word when you highlight it IRL, or you've built a personal calendar app for your family to display on a monitor in the kitchen. Whatever it is, I'd love to hear it.
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JKCalhoun ◴[] No.35740334[source]
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.)

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pwpw ◴[] No.35740882[source]
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!

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JKCalhoun ◴[] No.35741088[source]
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.

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giantrobot ◴[] No.35746143[source]
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).

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1. JKCalhoun ◴[] No.35747153[source]
Thank you! I will do that.