Media server software that lets me program my own television station.
5:00 PM - Play the next file from folder X.
6:00 PM - Play the next file from folder Y.
7:00 PM - Play the next file from folder Z.
8:00 PM - Play random movie.
Setting up something like a cron job is trivial, getting it to stream files from a particular folder, on a channel I can access on demand, is the trick.
Ideally I want to be able to change the input on my television, any time I want, to my personal streaming channel which is constantly running the schedule I’ve defined.
The one time I tried streaming I just piped ffmpeg output through icecast and that worked, but it took some reading of the ffmpeg wiki to find the right options. You might even be able to point icecast to the folder directly without ffmpeg. I needed ffmpeg because it was transcoding from a webcam. On the playback side you’d again use ffmpeg to stream the icecast channel to your computer’s hdmi output, and wire that to your TV. I’m still going with 10 line shell script, but maybe I’d use python to avoid too much shell cleverness.
Added: maybe you don’t even need icecast. Its purpose is to fan out a single input to multiple clients. You can even cascade them across a bunch of cheap VPS into a do-it-yourself youtube with 1000s of simultaneous viewers.
That would likely work if the intent was to watch files locally, and that’s not the goal. The goal is to stream them out to something viewable on a television.
A DLNA server can do the streaming, but not the scheduling and it won’t run continuously.
Ersatz is this brilliant self hosted IPTV server that can do this. Any client (even a browser or your smart tv) can run it. Setting up the channels are a bit clunky but it’s well documented
Media server software that lets me program my own television station.
5:00 PM - Play the next file from folder X.
6:00 PM - Play the next file from folder Y.
7:00 PM - Play the next file from folder Z.
8:00 PM - Play random movie.
That is like a 10 line bash script? Well maybe a little more but not much. Start here: https://linux.die.net/man/1/at
Setting up something like a cron job is trivial, getting it to stream files from a particular folder, on a channel I can access on demand, is the trick.
Ideally I want to be able to change the input on my television, any time I want, to my personal streaming channel which is constantly running the schedule I’ve defined.
The one time I tried streaming I just piped ffmpeg output through icecast and that worked, but it took some reading of the ffmpeg wiki to find the right options. You might even be able to point icecast to the folder directly without ffmpeg. I needed ffmpeg because it was transcoding from a webcam. On the playback side you’d again use ffmpeg to stream the icecast channel to your computer’s hdmi output, and wire that to your TV. I’m still going with 10 line shell script, but maybe I’d use python to avoid too much shell cleverness.
Added: maybe you don’t even need icecast. Its purpose is to fan out a single input to multiple clients. You can even cascade them across a bunch of cheap VPS into a do-it-yourself youtube with 1000s of simultaneous viewers.
Seems like it would be pretty easy to set up some cron job that would change a symlink to a folder every hour and just run programs from that symlink.
That would likely work if the intent was to watch files locally, and that’s not the goal. The goal is to stream them out to something viewable on a television.
A DLNA server can do the streaming, but not the scheduling and it won’t run continuously.
Seems like youre shooting these down without considering what the author meant by “program”.
There’s tons of these? I’ve been using DizqueTV for like five years without issue.
Not linking to reddit, but this DisqueTV?
0.o appreciate you bringing that to my attention.
Have you tried ErsatzTV? It’s selfhostable, pretty extensible, can be integrated into on-demand solutions like Jellyfin…
I look at different solutions from time to time, but it’s been a while, I’ll check that out!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W7m7OW2xrJE
This guy actually rolled his own internal home cableTV broadcast, which does exactly what you’re asking.
Composite video and mono audio… Ew. LOL.
Ersatz is this brilliant self hosted IPTV server that can do this. Any client (even a browser or your smart tv) can run it. Setting up the channels are a bit clunky but it’s well documented
https://ersatztv.org/ Your Personal IPTV Server | ErsatzTV
VLC (Video LAN Client) probably has a plugin for this. It was designed to stream video across networks.