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Show HN: If YouTube had actual channels

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Re: Show HN: If YouTube had actual channels

#131
post #111
post #6

The best part of this is the channel doesn't pause when you flip away from it. It is always "running" and if you flip away you will miss it. That builds in a FOMO trade-off which causes user to automatically/subconciously decide on channel they most want to watch, because they can't watch everything.

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 l…

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

Re: Show HN: If YouTube had actual channels

#133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The videos are hand-picked and are scheduled so everyone is watching the same thing at the same time.

I guess what I'm getting at is, we shouldn't expect this hand-picking to continue indefinitely, since this isn't a paid service. I'm guessing the playlists will start to loop before too long?

This is still an experiment at the moment, we'll figure it out.

Re: Show HN: If YouTube had actual channels

#134

What a different experience than default UI. Are you making the source for this public, and/or is it based on an existing project?

There is no backend, just plain html, css and js. The source is public.

Amazing! Are you generating the list.json and just pushing new data when it's due to run out? Or is there some logic that loops it?

Re: Show HN: If YouTube had actual channels

#135

Awesome! But please remove the static fuzz it's really unpleasant.

It's unpleasant because of the repeating patterns, IMHO. If it actually looked like NTSC or PAL snow it'd be quite nifty.

That's probably one of those things that's harder to generate dynamically than it sounds like it would be, though. Perlin noise might be the right approach.

Re: Show HN: If YouTube had actual channels

#137

This is something I always wonder... Something that I really miss from TV on internet content (YouTube, movie streamings and so on) is turn it on and watching what's being transmitted without thinking about what I wanna see. Three reasons: 1. Picking something to watch takes time. Sometimes I only want to see something in the 15 minutes that I'm dining alone. My meal gets cold before I start the video 2. Choosing som…

I hadn't watched actual television for years. Then, in a visit to my parents house, I randomly got to watch a band in a talkshow that later became a band that I love.

Re: Show HN: If YouTube had actual channels

#138
post #8

I really like how there are only 12 channels, and you don't get to choose what's on. The only way to make it even more like tv from a few decades ago would be if half of the channels were static.

if we're talking about stuff to make it more authentic, how about looking up my local weather if there's a strong storm the quality drops + more static, and a small (rng) chance of it completely breaking if the antenna upstairs got completely broken by the strong wind.

Re: Show HN: If YouTube had actual channels

#140
post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 no…

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 kind…

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.

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