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?
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!?
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.