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.

> Please don't post comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. It's a semi-noob illusion, as old as the hills.

I've been thinking about this myself. I have a few questions for you.

The first is how you organize them. With 10k videos, do you organize the files in some way?

Secondly, aside from this project, have you found a nice way to browse/watch these videos?

Thirdly, any chance you could throw your scripts up somewhere?

Dumb question, but is every channel "synched" such that, if two different users tune in on Jellyfin, at separate times, they will still see the same thing at (roughly, given latency, et al) the same time?

I was not able to figure this out from the docs thus far.

I didn't read his comment as saying that HN is turning into Reddit, just a bit of a joke about some people not minding or flexing the intensity of the "idle" state of their lab

Check out pinchflat. Think of it like sonarr for yt channels. I use it to grab content for my kid that he consumers via Plex so I can limit what he sees and remove the algo.

Pinchflat does all the renaming, metadata, and file structure as I configure.

There are more modern versions of such things that can do ATSC / QAM for full HD. I picked one up that takes multiple HDMI inputs with the idea of transmitting a couple outdoor cameras to our TVs but got sidetracked with the realization that none of the coax in my home is convenient to any of our TVs.

Something like this needs to exist for radio / music streaming, preferably in a physical form factor.

A lot of older people's objection to streaming is "I want to push a physical switch and get decent music + news + a bit of talk from a nice-sounding speaker". Radio provides this. Streaming does not.

You can add the content to Plex and browse your YT downloads there

I'm sure you can have those AI generated, even with some humor.

Yeah but you’re at the mercy of their contracts and their captive experience.

By default, yes. There is an option when creating a "channel" to make it on-demand too.

We reversed the direction if the user started going backwards. We talked about a third tuner to hold the previous channel if they decided to reverse direction but the cost wasn't worth it.

The whole technology was kind of a dead man walking by that point in history. iPhone killed it all.

I installed and set this up with my jellyfin server last night.

It's a but rough around the edges, but still pretty good for a project that is obviously in the early stages.

The transctranscoding pipeline seems a bit confused, though. It seems like Tunarr is streaming meadia (raw?) from Jellyfin, and doing its own transcoding. Then jellyfin sees it as a raw broadcast signal, and then transcodes 2-5 second chunks to send out to the client.

Every client I've tried to use has had some real buffering problems. The system can just barely pump out frames fast enough for a 1:1 playback speed. Most clients only ever have a few seconds in the buffer, so interruptions are frequent. It also seems to not support subtitles correctly? All of my shows have subtitles, but I don't get an option to enable them during playback.

Jellyfin also doesn't seem to like the program guide.

One of my channels shows up correctly, and the guide info is integrated into jellyfin. If I open that channel, it shows me thumbnails for all upcoming episodes, and they're linked to the episodes in my library. The other channel has nothing. I can only show what's playing now.

But, it's all pretty simple to set up, and my husband is thrilled about his favorite comfort show now being on a permanent loop he can tune into at any time

(1) Are you missing some words in your sentence? I would understand your point if you said "don't post comments ** like that ** it makes HN feel like it is turning into Reddit **.

However I cannot understand how you extrapolated that I actually stated that Hacker News is turning into Reddit. That is factually and materially evident by my non-editable comment above.

I assume that you meant (1) and I can understand where you are coming from.

However we are just extremely into hosting our own servers and services. Some go to extremes, and there really are no places on the internet like /r/homelab and /r/homedatacenter , maybe only /r/selfhosted .

How do you guard against getting your downloader connected to your google account (by IP address or some other association), and getting your google account perm-banned?

Thank you so much!!!

I wish it supported other sites that yt-dlp supports, particularly Nebula but this is already a great start, and hopefully they'll add other sites eventually. It seems this has been discussed before.

Super interesting - would you mind sharing more info of how you used this with a tool like ErsatzTV?

The docker approach seems inviting.

Hey all, maintainer here. A little late to the post (not sure how I missed this!) but happy to answer any questions anybody has.

I have a lot of plans for this project, so I'm really excited to see some enthusiasm around it!

Ah, I thought that connecting a custom Live TV source to Plex required the pass. If that is not the case, I can remove the line from the README!

Yes, client connections are synced. They also all reuse the same underlying transcode stream, so there is no extra work with more connections (besides delivering the stream)

Maintainer here (and fan of ETV)! Currently, the most fundamental difference between Tunarr and ETV is scheduling methodology, though this is on the road to change. ETV takes a top-down approach; you schedule lists/collections (either custom, or just a whole series, for instance), clump those choices together, and customize how they "play out" their contents, e.g. "play 2 programs from series A, then play 4 programs at random from collection X".

Tunarr is, currently (and like it's predecessor dizqueTV), a bottom-up scheduler. You create a schedule with a flat list of programs (episodes, movies, etc). Then, you apply transformations to that list (grouping, padding, etc) in order to build your schedule. This is a bit of a simplification.

Both programs have a range of tedium in their scheduling, depending on how particular you are about your schedule.

Of course, ETV is more mature than Tunarr, so there are a lot of other features it has that Tunarr does not. It is also, likely, more stable. However Tunarr's streaming stability has come a long way and was the primary focus in the beginning of the project.

Got it - thanks! I might suggest adding a comparison section to the website (whenever appropriate). Appreciate the response, I look forward to checking it out.

Absolutely, I think you're right. I appreciate the feedback.

Please let me know how your experience goes with hooking up Tunarr (I'm the maintainer)!