Tunarr: Create and configure live TV channels from media on your servers

I tried this for a while with ErsatzTV and really loved it. I don’t have cable anymore but I remember fond memories of cycling through channels as a child.

I set up a food channel that would cycle through Masterchef and a few travel cooking shows, one for anime and one for Bollywood movies.

It was incredibly enjoyable. I could just put on a channel after work without having to consciously make a decision on what to watch. Just watch whatever’s on the channel and switch over to something else if it didn’t click!

Definitely going to try this out on my NAS.

I tried ErsatzTV, but didn't manage to get it actually up and running. This was a few years ago though, guess I'll try again!

I’ve done it a few months ago and it was super smooth. Sounds like the process got better.

I have been threatening to do this for a while just put all of my dvd rips on a server on make channels based on genera scifi (star trek stargate etc) cartoon (loony toons popeye...) sitcoms (scrubs HowIMetYourMother Frasier Cheer) all of my kids horrible shows on another. i often find i end up flipping thorugh netflix with option paralysis when i mostly want background noise this would be nice.

Once you have the channels, the next step is to pick up a few old RF modulators and run your own cable TV network at home. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W7m7OW2xrJE

I recommend it! I did that and started using https://www.quasitv.app, which is similar. It completely removes the paralysis you're talking about.

"If you want to play the TV channels in Plex using the spoofed HDHR, Plex Pass is required."

FYI with ErsatzTV, the one I use, (which is great) a Plex Pass isn't needed.

> fond memories of cycling through channels as a child

One thing that’s missing is the low-latency old analog systems had changing channels. Has anyone figured out a way to achieve this in the digital era?

After using pluto.tv for a while this inspired me to look into some HD rf modulators and get this project going

I worked on a DVB-H receiver back in the day and we tried to speed it up by having a complete second tuner in hardware and starting the acquisition on the next stream while decoding the first one.

Now if you set up some DVR software to record the channel ...

That’s fun. I suppose flipping up channels is far more common than down, but presumably one direction would be faster with this solution.

That sounds fun, is it computationally expensive? Is it, like, actually processing the stuff even if nobody's watching? I'm not gonna try it on my current NAS, because it's all HDDs and I can hear it in the room, so I mostly use it as "cold" storage, but your post really made me want to try it. Also, now that I'm thinking of it, must be pretty hard for HDDs too, if you don't use some dedicated all-SSD NAS specifically for that...

My dad, who passed away 2023, left a stack of over 100 VHS tapes full of 80s TV. It’s mostly music (esp. bass guitar orientated), steam trains, photography and I think this would make the perfect way to digest that content.

Thanks for sharing.

No, unless somebody starts a stream there's no computation. If nobody is watching, it's idle.

If somebody tunes in, the server figures out where to start the stream and begins streaming.

What a dream!! This is something I have wanted for a long time, and can't wait to set this up

Please consider uploading the tapes to Internet Archive, YouTube, an open directory, etc.

I'm backing up my Youtube favorites locally since 2018, so far 10k videos. I might try to use this because seems like would be a fun way to play them in the background on a second monitor.

Not really. the definition of what the 'next' stream is could easily change depending on what the last button you pressed, with the assumption that you would continue pressing that button:

  * up - next stream is one more channel up
  * down - next stream is one more channel down
  * last/prev - next stream is the previous channel.

I've been thinking about doing this. What's your setup?

This is awesome! This is what I'd like to do at home albeit with DVB-T.

I've seen a lot of clabretro's videos and am especially hooked on the token ring series. I don't know why since that was just outside of me starting to work on networking (we ran a 10-base-2 at home since my dad worked in networking) but he's so calm and a good story teller. Highly recommended channel!

Not the OP, but I have a Postfix mail server running on my home media box that receives YouTube URLs sent to its special email address. Postfix passes the message to a Python script that parses out the URL and places it into a Redis queue. A second Python program, running as a daemon, watches the queue and then downloads the video using yt-dlp. I can also enqueue video URLs from the command line.

This is the command that the daemon runs to request 720p, for example:

    command = 'yt-dlp --write-info-json -f "bv*[height<=720]+ba" --output "out.%%(ext)s" --merge-output-format mp4 "%s"' % url

yt-dlp

I just parse the URLs from the liked playlist every couple of days with a Chrome extension then simply run the app.

yt-dlp would work automatically too with logins but I'm always too nervous that Google would just straight up ban my account for whatever reasons. So I rather do it in a more manual way.

You live in the future

I run a flask app with an endpoint that takes a video URL and runs yt-dlp. I have a bookmarklet that submits the URL of the current video page I'm on to the web service.

Also when I'm in NewPipe on the phone I can go to a video and share the URL to an app that forwards it to the web service.

If you've got it working then obviously it must be possible, but I'm a touch confused because the ErsatzTV documentation says "A Plex Pass is required for ErsatzTV to work with Plex." (https://ersatztv.org/docs/user-guide/configure-clients)

Is it possible that you had this working in the past but Plex has since removed the functionality from their free tier?

Yes!!! I have been wanting to make this for a long time. I want to make 1990s TV channels and have them on TVs around the house.

I just love the feeling this gives. I'm even almost tempted to add some K-Mart infomercials vhs rips:)

/r/homelab and /r/homedatacenter called. We love computationally expensive.

I've never had a Plex Pass and I currently use ErsatzTV through Plex daily. I also tried out Tunarr this afternoon and got it working. Though I'll be sticking with ErsatzTV.

Does anyone know how this compares to ErsatzTV?

I recently bought an HDMI Transmitter and as my laptop's HDMI port doesn't output sound. I've rigged a Bluetooth RX/TX dongle plugged in to the headphone-out port which made me giddy in nerd. It's voodoo.

Being able to stream from my laptop to my TV in 1080p without any additional cables and using emulators for games is kind of dark magic.

I need to purchase a usb DAC and better quality BT streaming devices, creative a web-ui to finish the setup. But that was cool, would love to do something when I upgrade from an apartment especially with the 3x cable monitors.

Sounds like how RMS browses the web. Nice setup, by the way.

Is latency noticable for games or NBD?

Now we just need some free, open-licensed commercials for non-existent products and services to inject at random intervals throughout the program. (Only mildly joking)

Tangentially related, if you like the "cable tv" concept of streaming, https://ytch.xyz which has been on HN before provides a similar expierience.

There are youtube channels with old TV Ads. Some of those will be non-existant.

You could also go down the Turbo Encabulator rabbit hole:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ac7G7xOG2Ag https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RXJKdh1KZ0w

Not that I have noticed. Everything has been ace.

I recommend VHS Revue for a comedic, Australian take on old VHS content

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=--AqQpz2ZXs&list=PLWeppF9fEM...

FYI, Netflix will release a similar concept soon.