[Nouser76]

I have a local media collection that I like to have as background noise/entertainment while I work. One thing I didn't like about self-managed libraries vs radio/television/etc. is that I still had the cognitive load of choosing what to watch, specifically. So I wrote a small program to take a list of shows and shuffle them[0] then interleave episodes. Depending on when you start this channel, it has a time offset so you're dropped in the middle of an episode (just like channel surfing!), and has support for showing a certain show only in sequential order[1], and even adding commercials between episodes.

[0] Native shuffle in my media player didn't feel random enough, with a poor play count distribution. Switching to programmatically shuffling means I can also weight things so that a specific show is more/less likely to show back-to-back.

[1] I actually only consider the smallest continuous run of unwatched episodes, starting from the end of the series, and interleave vs shuffling the episodes.