#ersatztv

[wcvconsensus]

I've truly gone full esoteric wizardgirl on this one: I'm learning to set up an iptv service that plays my downloaded shows at scheduled times with advertisements and channel bumpers/idents....

I have reinvented cable but with piracy

[arielsewhere]

Hope it's alright if I add on to this - I'm seeing people in the notes who want to make their own FreakTV-style TV channels, and as someone who was inspired to set up something similar after first seeing these bumpers, I wanted to share some of the basics of my methods~ (continued below cut)

If you have a computer connected to the internet and the space to store the content you want to watch, you can use ErsatzTV (a personal IPTV server) and Jellyfin (my preferred personal media server (Plex or Emby are also options)) to set up any number of channels, and set them to play more or less anything you want on any schedule you want, as long as you have the files of the media you want it to play - the setup for both of these server programs is fairly straightforward, and both have a ton of accessible tutorials (like these) available on their respective websites. How you get media files of whatever shows you'd like to include is up to you to figure out.

If you want to share access to the servers (which host your TV channel/s) with friends but don't really know anything about networks, Tailscale is a VPN that assigns you a secondary IP as part of a virtual local network, but you don't really have to know what that means in order to use it. Since there aren't as many accessible tutorials for this specific use of Tailscale, here are the basics of copying my Tailscale setup, where I use Jellyfin's built-in IPTV support to watch my ErsatzTV channels:

1.) After setting up Jellyfin and ErsatzTV, make sure you've followed this tutorial for making your ErsatzTV channels accessible in Jellyfin 2.) Install Tailscale and create a Tailscale account on the computer running ErsatzTV/Jellyfin (you may want to set up 2 Tailscale accounts, one for users and one for admin - though doing this is a little more complicated than you'd expect, and just having 1 account is probably fine if you can't/don't want to figure it out) 3.) Install and log into Tailscale on whatever device you want to watch your TV channel/s on 4.) Go to the Tailscale dashboard in your browser, find the Tailscale IP address of the computer running ErsatzTV/Jellyfin, and copy it 5.) Paste that IP into your browser's address bar, and add ":8096" to the end of it (you can also follow this step in a Jellyfin client app instead of a browser, which I'd recommend at least trying out) 6.) The Jellyfin Web-UI should now be open in your browser, which you should be able to use to watch your ErsatzTV channels

For what it's worth, when I've used Tailscale to stream my TV channels or anything via Jellyfin to my phone, for reasons beyond my understanding, the quality has genuinely been flawless, even over mobile data - I can't recommend it enough.

As a disclaimer, there are probably faster ways of setting this up, but as I have enjoyed investing a lot of extra time into my Jellyfin server, I haven't done the experimenting to come up with any. If you really just want one TV channel and nothing else, setting all this up without also setting up a media server like Jellyfin is possible, but it would introduce a couple of new issues you'd have to find solutions for, one being that ErsatzTV doesn't come with a built-in player to actually watch your channels with. So, whether or not you want to experiment to find different methods is up to you.

Anyway, hope this is useful to some of you, go nuts ✌️

here's a compilation of Every FreakTV Bumper That I've Made, in chronological order of creation, along with titles and reviews of them.

FreakTV is a fake TV channel my friends and i created to be used as a discord bot that streamed randomly selected episodes from our favorite TV shows, 24/7, in a dedicated channel. between each aired episode there was a "coming up next" break, and one of hundreds of bumpers that all of us created over time

[xtheneox]

I started buying dvds because I want to own my media

then I started ripping them and hosting my own plex server because I like the convenience of streaming

now I'm using ersatztv to set up my own iptv channels so I don't have to choose what I want to watch

I've just reinvented cable

[fictionalred]

Nice!!! I'm looking forward to the ErsatzTV review !!

The old laptop we use for kodi rn is one I'd very much like to keep. Last year I replaced the optical drive and the screen [link to post] so I'm def using this baby for many more years to come!

PC update time!!

My GPU (Nvidia GTX 970) needed a replacement, which meant a new motherboard meaning a new CPU and memory. So, costly, ... but here's the replacement:

AMD Radeon RX 7800 XT :))

Out with the old, in with the new

My biggest change in my brain is however the monitor set up. I had an old screen, on the left side, as a second monitor. Now, with Ephron's old monitor, I have set my main screen on the left.

(still need to tweak the colour settings)

I'll get used to it quickly I hope!

But yay fancy PC again!! Even the computer store owner said it was a very good choice :D

(the old computer parts are going to a friend who'll reuse them seeing as they still work fine. we just have too many outdated PC's ourselves already)