[obviyus]

I tried this for a while with ErsatzTV and really loved it. I don’t have cable anymore but I remember fond memories of cycling through channels as a child.

I set up a food channel that would cycle through Masterchef and a few travel cooking shows, one for anime and one for Bollywood movies.

It was incredibly enjoyable. I could just put on a channel after work without having to consciously make a decision on what to watch. Just watch whatever’s on the channel and switch over to something else if it didn’t click!

Definitely going to try this out on my NAS.

[thakoppno]

> fond memories of cycling through channels as a child

One thing that’s missing is the low-latency old analog systems had changing channels. Has anyone figured out a way to achieve this in the digital era?

[joezydeco]

I worked on a DVB-H receiver back in the day and we tried to speed it up by having a complete second tuner in hardware and starting the acquisition on the next stream while decoding the first one.

[thakoppno]

That’s fun. I suppose flipping up channels is far more common than down, but presumably one direction would be faster with this solution.

[joezydeco]

We reversed the direction if the user started going backwards. We talked about a third tuner to hold the previous channel if they decided to reverse direction but the cost wasn't worth it.

The whole technology was kind of a dead man walking by that point in history. iPhone killed it all.

[justinsaccount]

Not really. the definition of what the 'next' stream is could easily change depending on what the last button you pressed, with the assumption that you would continue pressing that button:

  * up - next stream is one more channel up
  * down - next stream is one more channel down
  * last/prev - next stream is the previous channel.

[krick]

That sounds fun, is it computationally expensive? Is it, like, actually processing the stuff even if nobody's watching? I'm not gonna try it on my current NAS, because it's all HDDs and I can hear it in the room, so I mostly use it as "cold" storage, but your post really made me want to try it. Also, now that I'm thinking of it, must be pretty hard for HDDs too, if you don't use some dedicated all-SSD NAS specifically for that...

[ertian]

No, unless somebody starts a stream there's no computation. If nobody is watching, it's idle.

If somebody tunes in, the server figures out where to start the stream and begins streaming.

[unixhero]

/r/homelab and /r/homedatacenter called. We love computationally expensive.

[sublinear]

> Please don't post comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. It's a semi-noob illusion, as old as the hills.

[gnarlynarwhal42]

I didn't read his comment as saying that HN is turning into Reddit, just a bit of a joke about some people not minding or flexing the intensity of the "idle" state of their lab

[unixhero]

(1) Are you missing some words in your sentence? I would understand your point if you said "don't post comments ** like that ** it makes HN feel like it is turning into Reddit **.

However I cannot understand how you extrapolated that I actually stated that Hacker News is turning into Reddit. That is factually and materially evident by my non-editable comment above.

I assume that you meant (1) and I can understand where you are coming from.

However we are just extremely into hosting our own servers and services. Some go to extremes, and there really are no places on the internet like /r/homelab and /r/homedatacenter , maybe only /r/selfhosted .

[skerit]

I tried ErsatzTV, but didn't manage to get it actually up and running. This was a few years ago though, guess I'll try again!

[dewey]

I’ve done it a few months ago and it was super smooth. Sounds like the process got better.

[j45]

The docker approach seems inviting.

[chrisbenincasa]

Please let me know how your experience goes with hooking up Tunarr (I'm the maintainer)!

[j45]

Super interesting - would you mind sharing more info of how you used this with a tool like ErsatzTV?