Hiya,

Plex / Jellyfin are nice and all, but you know what I really want? A TV-like “channel” I can configure with TV shows & movies to play on a schedule. I miss the cycle of Morning News -> trashy daytime tv -> light afternoon programming -> prime time -> late night -> repeat, or simply turning on the TV & having something already playing. Or that one-button channel up/down to move to a totally different vibe. “Playlists” in Plex/Jellyfin almost do what I want, but they’re difficult to pick up midway through, the “dumb shuffle” doesn’t care if I’ve seen an episode recently, and I can’t really mimic that daily tv cycle.

Is there a media streamer that does this? Do Plex/Jellyfin have that function & I’ve just missed it? If it doesn’t exist, would someone be a pal and whip that up?

  • tvcvt@lemmy.mlEnglish
    1·
    32 minutes ago

    As others have said, ersatztv would be the way to go, but apparently is no longer being developed. I’m still using it, but there was a conversation a few days ago that might have some leads on good replacements: https://lemmy.ml/post/44804563

  • fleem@piefed.zeromedia.vipEnglish
    5·
    3 hours ago

    Ive tried ersatz and a couple of other things it was cool

    if you’re needing this channel on multiple devices at once (synced-ish) then ersatz is the way to go… but it uses some hardware/horsepower and it bugged me seeing the metrics spin up on that server for me to wanna have some background noise

    instead, i found out kodi can do smart playlists!

    I have jellyfin/emby feeding several kodi installs, and made various playlists based around various rules (can be genre, folder, tags, or TV show titles etc), with one of the rules being playcount for episodes/movies being under a certain number.

    added a script for starting each playlist to buttons in home assistant, and bam, poor mans channels.

    when an episode gets finished, the playcount goes up, keeping us from seeing the same episodes.

    i know we’re getting crazy here but i even created a variable, so when the house knows i put it in “TV mode” like that, it maps my channel up and down buttons to the skip foward, skip previous buttons, making it feel more like channel surfing. which is a little much, but puts a smile on my face.

    in the home assistant script, you could add a “skip 3 minutes” when “changing channels” so it feels like real TV, no need to see the first few minutes of speed! Where is Sandra Bullock!?

    • HeartyOfGlass@piefed.socialOPEnglish
      2·
      3 hours ago

      Your “poor man’s channels” is a slick fix. I haven’t messed with HA yet, but didn’t think about whether that could cue up specific playlists. That’d get me one bit closer.

  • nfreak@lemmy.mlEnglish
    9·
    4 hours ago

    ErsatzTV is great for this, but it just entered maintenance mode and I don’t think any forks are currently continuing the work. Still, it’ll probably continue to work without issues for a long time.

    • HeartyOfGlass@piefed.socialOPEnglish
      2·
      3 hours ago

      Dang. Yeah, that’s exactly what I want. Shame to see it’s unmaintained, but I’ll have to give it a shot anyway.

      • CmdrShepard49@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        1·
        24 minutes ago

        I ran it for a while and it was a little confusing to set up but worked well in the end. I did have some major issues with trying to use it alongside my HDHomeRun (local antenna channels) in Plex. xTeve allows you to combine the two programming schedules into one since Plex only allows for one at a time, but for whatever reason the output would come out all scrambled with shows being tied to the wrong channel. It seemed to work fine in Emby, so it should work fine in Jellyfin, and you likely wouldn’t even encounter this since most people don’t have live TV setup anyways.

  • GalacticHero@lemmy.worldEnglish
    5·
    4 hours ago

    I was just about to set up ErsatzTV for this exact thing, but the maintainer announced recently that he’s not updating it anymore and nobody is taking over. It’s probably fine for now, but I’m hesitant to start running it. He’s encouraging forks, but none are really the clear successor yet as far as I know. I don’t know if there’s anything else comparable.

  • Maybelline@techhub.social
    2·
    4 hours ago

    @HeartyOfGlass

    ErsatzTV is what I use, but it’s definitely overkill for my usage. I just want a channel that plays Friends, Seinfeld, The Office, Parks & Rec, all shuffled, all day.

    ErsatzTV definitely works for that, but it’s overkill for just that use case.