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Ersatz-TV: why does my show not play? (lemmy.world)
submitted 1 week ago by to c/techsupport@lemmy.world
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I’ve spent so many hours on this. I’m trying to get Star Trek TNG to play at 7:30pm on Mondays and Fridays (all seven seasons, sequentially). But my player still just shows “Channel is Offline”.

I’ve scanned local media and the show is detected. I created a channel and a schedule, and set the collection type to the entire series. The playout is paired with the channel. The m3u link shows “Channel is Offline” in IINA (like VLC but for macOS).

Any help appreciated. I’m a bit overwhelmed by the breath of options and documentation.

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[–] 3 points 1 week ago (7 children)

What's your schedule look like for it? I think that's where the problem would be.

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  • [–] [S] 2 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (6 children)

    Thanks for asking. Here are a few screenshots. Actually ... it looks like a lot of nearly all the info I remember entering is not present ... I did save religiously.

    I'm adding the entries again. I see there is no save button for the playout. When I jump to another tab within ErsatzTV and come back the Playout list is empty again. Okay, I've figured that out. Pressing "add playout" a second time saves my entries. I set an episode of a TV show to start just now and nothing happened on the player.

    ErsatzTV Legacy Version v26.11.3-osx-arm64

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  • [–] 2 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (5 children)

    Ahh. I've never used blocks- just the classic scheduling. I think me not understanding it probably steered me away.

    I could tell you how I have classic scheduling. I set it up, add "schedule items" and while mine are dynamic time and in multiples of two, you can select fixed time. So you could add star trek TNG to start at 730 and play X amount of episodes.

    Really it just gets hairy if you really want to start at clean intervals I think. I agree it's very convoluted.

    Edit- didn't see your day requirements. It won't work then I don't think. Once I get some free time maybe this weekend I'll try playing around with it. Id honestly prefer one or two channels of my own to be more defined like this.

    Further edit- near as I can tell you...

    • add your blocks
    • make a template group (channel 344 maybe)
    • make templates underneath that with blocks
    • make a new play out attached to your channel
    • add template group items under that with your days/times

    I think...

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  • [–] [S] 2 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago) (3 children)

    Thanks again, I've given that a try. Two minutes before my show is scheduled, I heard the disks spinning up, but nothing showed at the m3u link http://localhost:8409/iptv/channels.m3u

    I didn't make a new playout, but I did refresh it. I'll try with a new playout and if that doesn't work I'll just wait until yourself or someone else figures it out.

    Part of the problem is definitely settings not being properly saved at times, but at this stage I think I can rule that out.

    Edit: oh, the episode at 7:30 played and startled me 😄

    Now I just need to get this to happen on the correct days.

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  • [–] 2 points 5 days ago (2 children)

    At this point I might ask you for directions, ha. I am only maybe today getting around to messing with it more. I think a redesign could make it easier (and I'm not sure why it has so many things- blocks, block groups, templates, template groups, etc.) Very customizable I suppose but a bit tough to get going.

    Glad to see you got it mostly going though.

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  • [–] [S] 1 point 4 days ago (1 child)

    Haha, fair enough! :) It is labyrinthine. I’m not sure how I got it working, and I still don’t know how it works (I don’t know what I have).

    I’m happy to share what I have if there’s a section you’d like to see. Though I imagine it’s the relationships between the parts that we’re both missing.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 days ago

    I think I got it going. At least just on a test channel. I think it's more that I want to know how I could organize all 4 parts (b, bg, t, tg) to put into a playout and not duplicate. Ie. some channels will have certain blocks that could be used elsewhere.

    I won't have time anytime soon to mess with it more but thanks for at least prompting me to look into it more. I do think I'd like at least a couple channels on a defined schedule like old school TV. Reminds me I should donate to this project- I use it a lot more nowadays.

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  • [–] [S] 2 points 1 week ago

    If you get around to it, great. In the mean-time I’ll try your suggestion. Thanks, I appreciate the help!

    It’s so easy in a calendar application to set up recurring events. I think the UI could definitely be rethought - at least for my use case.

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