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.