I added ErsatzTV to my Plex setup about a month ago and we honestly love it so much. I've got 2 sitcom channels, British panel shows, Taskmaster, all Star Trek all the time, British sitcoms, cartoons, and a few others.

Its really nice to just sit down and watch "whatever is on" (even though I could switch over to the main library and watch any episode I want).

Sometimes I just want a 0-effort/0-decision background noise while I work on something else or browse on my phone.

I've done the same thing with dizqueTv for my grandmother. On her Android TV, I was able to integrate the IPTV channels on the same channels list, so she can simply use the remote to navigate between the digital channels and the IPTV channels (30 for Hercule Poirot, 31 for classic B&W movies, etc.)

dizqueTv, ErsatzTV... these are the "Chinese company names on Amazon" of TV app names.

No clue about dizqueTV, but ErsatzTV is German for tv replacement/substitute :-) so it has a little more meaning then the Chinese Amazon names ;-)

Ersatz is also a perfectly cromulent English word [0]

[0] https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/ersatz

I've also been using ErsatzTV with my jellyfin setup. It can take a while to setup channels how you want them, but I love my sci-fi channel which is going through all the Star Treks, Stargates, and Twilight Zones.

It is so much easier to flip it on to my Sci-fi Channel, animation channel, movie channel, or James Bond marathon channel then to decide what to watch. And since I've seen all this content, it is often kinda nice to start in the middle of an episode.

I also found a ton of old Nickelodeon, Cartoon Network, and Adult Swim bumps that I use as some filler content if I want episodes to start on the hour.

I've been thinking a lot about setting up some kids channels with specific hours (like channel comes on at 7am, goes off during part of the day, comes back on in the afternoon, and goes offline at bedtime) for my siblings kids, as I think letting them just browser youtube kids is terrible.

> I also found a ton of old Nickelodeon, Cartoon Network, and Adult Swim bumps

Where were you able to find these? Recreating one of these channels has been a side project I’ve wanted to do for ages.

I think it was mostly youtube and retrojunk.com

Try searching for "$channel bump"

Personally, I think Adult Swim had the best bumps, usually just some nice house music with a nice animation and some funny quotes.

I'm really interested in this but I'm having trouble googling. What is a bump? Is it referring to this? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bumper_(broadcasting)

Yup. Here's a playlist for adult swim ones. I just used yt-dlp and passed in the playlist URL and it will download all the bumps as separate files:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HS8kchdwFPM&list=PL075thqiB6...

There's a torrent going around the usual places that has every [as] bump from the launch of the network to whenever they last updated the archive (a few months ago in my case.)

Do you know if that can operate with no transcoding?

I’ve designed my media set-up around Jellyfin on a weak server that can’t handle transcoding, and very-capable clients that don’t need it. This lets me avoid like half the bugs on the Jellyfin bug tracker and all the instability an Nvidia or AMD video card would introduce to the server itself.

I’m very interested in this, but can’t use it if it must transcode.

No, it must transcode to work correctly, which can be a problem for me too (although I just have an intel card and use vaapi).

I believe there is a container you can use where it doesn't transcode, but it trips up every player I have tried, as they do not like having different resolutions/codecs suddenly swap.

Damn, kinda what I figured. Thanks. Maybe some day I’ll upgrade/downgrade to a less perfectly-stable server that is transcoding capable.

What CPU?

Intel Quicksync is very capable (even more so than most AMD/Nvidia cards) and any 7th gen or newer Intel CPU with integrated graphics has it and has good codec support.

It’s an old used Lenovo workstation. It has a some kind of quad-core Intel processor but can’t usefully transcode from h.265 at all (no hardware support, I assume) and is bad at most other codecs at resolutions above 720p or so. Even transcoding within its limits seems to tax it, so I doubt it could maintain two transcodes at once in any case—we sometimes have three streams going, or one or two plus someone playing on its Minecraft server, and it can keep up with all that just fine, but transcoding’s out.

I’ve even seen it turn into a slideshow remuxing original video with transcoded audio. It’s not very capable.

Ahh probably a Xeon CPU, they don't have an iGPU.

I was checking out their docs and ran across this option for channels:

> HLS Direct does not transcode content and can perform better on low power systems, but does not support watermarks and some clients will have issues at program boundaries

Sounds like that might be what you’re looking for?

ErsatzTV is amazing. It’s actually excellent for settings up kids channels. You can configure start and end times and select a pool of content/shows/movies to pick from.

One nifty feature is that you can configure “filler” content to inject randomly between episodes. I used this to add short educational clips from a kids TV channel in the Middle East.

I've been using Quasi TV (android app) to try out the concept. I remember having something similar back in the boxee / xbmc days. I especially liked that it "just worked" without having to set anything up besides pointing it at my plex. I'm not afraid of hosting something, but I didn't want to go through the trouble if it turned out I wasn't going to use it.

I quite like it. Unfortunately, the app's been a bit buggy - not always picking up the stream at the "current time" and sometimes navigation gets wonky. But it was a good test run and that, along with your post, has convinced me to give Ersatz (or something like it) a try.

Yep this works really nicely, and psychologically it's somehow way more relaxing than having to curate what you watch

I predict this appears as real youtube feature soon. Since it will also allow them to do a Spotify-style payola approach to scheduling.

> I predict this appears as real youtube feature soon.

I doubt it would. The modern style of binging on-demand streaming content seems to be too effective at capturing attention. Remember that lots of people get notifications on their phone the instant a new video comes out for a subscribed channel, especially kids and teens who haven't developed resistance to these business models.

YT would be unlikely to spend any effort implementing an alternate mode that doesn't capture attention as effectively; the old model of live channels is likely a niche preference. If somehow this did prove to be more effective at capturing attention, I could see it being implemented, but that would surprise me.

well they already have youtube shorts, which is kinda similar.

I hate that if anytime I upload a short video it forces the video to YouTube shorts. Especially since I’m not making content for the public - it’s more a demo video or something to specifically send to a few people. As with so many services nowadays, I like the ability to use YouTube shorts when I want, but I hate that it’s forced upon us with no reasonable and consistent method to not use shorts at the users discretion.

Uploading horizontally or >1m should fix this?

Most things or demos I send are horizontal, but I agree, the automatic shorts of vertical is annoying

But that triggers an immediate tiktok dopamine chase. I immediately want to judge what I'm seeing and swipe to move on. I start wondering about the ML training on my every move and hesitation. It's restless

Along the same lines, I have a near-terabyte of videos I have downloaded from Youtube, of my own vast and multivariate interests, and having it on random, with a simple pause/next/prev-style interface, is also a compelling viewer-experience equillibrium akin to the sets of yore ..

(cue Buggles..)

I have long wanted Netflix to offer this feature. Just give me a random episode of a low stakes sitcom. Seinfeld, SVU, whatever.

My other wishlist item was that Netflix would offer a “shuffle” this series option. For standalone episodic shows, ordering does not matter, and it is a bunch of overhead to pick something.

Netflix offered this in France back in 2020[0], but appeared to have removed it in 2022[1].

0: https://www.vulture.com/2020/11/netflix-linear-channels-dire... 1: https://www.numerama.com/pop-culture/1273686-netflix-direct-...

I didn't realize how much I would appreciate shuffle until i started using jellyfin.

I use it all the time for shows that have self-contained episodes (e.g. Futurama).

>I predict this appears as real youtube feature soon

I highly doubt it. They're going to wait for competitors to implement it and have it for several years before they bother to poorly copy the idea.

They experimented with it for a bit last year. I think Linus talked about it on the WAN show, and for a while LTT had it enabled on their channel.

It was essentially a 24/7 livestream which played from their back catalogue, with the ability to add "promo" segments in between videos, which they used for products on their merch store.

Seemed to dissapear around the same time the whole monoblock scandal and production shutdown happened last year, so I'm not sure if the YouTube experiment also concluded or if they turned it off during the shutdown.

channels are synced so everyone is watching the same exact content at the same time, just like TV.

yeah when i noticed this, it blew my mind.

Another observation: with this setup, you essentially randomly jump into the middle of videos, skipping what is usually the most grating part of the show: the intro.

In the intro to most shows/videos, there's annoying jingles, silly animations, a redundant summary of what's about to happen in an already short segment, or just useless chatter "hey guys! it's your boy, _. welcome to my channel, remember to smash that like button, we have a great show today".

Because of all this intro bloat, I tend to jump a few minutes into most YouTube videos by default.

This was the first thing I noticed, too. It's amazing how much better it is, simply leaving off all that "what's up guys" introduction.

The only thing worse than the intro is the 2nd intro. Just get to the GD content please.

It's no longer functional, but in the past if you appended the parameter t=wadsworth to a YouTube URL it would skip the first 30% of a video.

I don't see how this is a good thing. It's a totally artificial constraint. It's already impossible to watch everything on youtube. I don't want software I use to instill fear as a design goal, detached from any of the outcomes of user actions.

Because like TV, when you're watching something, you know other people are watching exactly the same thing. And that's pretty cool.

The FOMO would only work if the content was exclusively available during that livestream, and not re-posted later.

That being said, I think the last thing society needs is to make these platforms more addictive. The algorithms already do a good enough job of keeping us glued.

If only we had a TiVo...

> It is always "running" and if you flip away you will miss it.

Throw in some ads and it will be everything I hate about broadcast TV.

That is what it was like in the 90s! Although you could use your VCR to record the other channel.

I use Pluto for this. Quick download, no sign up required, and tons of topic-specific channels to switch to. I put it on all my devices and don't even worry about it.

Google TV also has a "Live" tab that collects all the live channels across all your apps and puts it into a TV guide grid. I've installed Fubo and Tubi and others just to build out my TV guide.

Works pretty well.

I was part of Pluto's launch team. We used to literally just be 95% YouTube embeds that were forced into a live-like experience client-side. Getting simple YouTube or even HTML5 video API calls to work reliably in 2013 was quite a feat. Loads of people still had Flash, mobile browsers were a crapshoot, and I caused many many thousands of early Amazon Fire TV hard restarts due to crashing their (kernel?) video decoder somehow.

Fun times.

Each channel displays the video code for the YouTube video its playing so if you see something interesting you can easily access the video. I really like this as a curated discovery tool, there is something up flipping thru channels and catching something at just the right time to peak your interest that viewing a clickbaity thumbnail and video title just can't replicate.