Spotted this on the Hackaday blog. This project really impressed me at the effort it must’ve taken to get this right.

“Irish Craic Party” made a “RetroTV” television network running on a Raspberry Pi 4 with an external 2TB hard drive filled with films, series and commercial bumpers and the like to recreate the older 80’s and 90’s TV networks, with each own recreations or original (derivatives) of actual TV channels from back then.

Sadly, he does not seem to be willing to open source the project, according to the video description:

“Even without: this is a one-off bespoke project with time / effort exceeding what people would likely be willing to pay, DIY media servers are niche, certain omissions would be made to avoid legal clashes and I don’t have time to maintain an open-source project. Most of all, I’m ready to move on to new things.”

Regardless, this project piqued my interest into wanting to create the same experience for films and series I’ve even have yet to watch (to combat the “analysis paralysis” his video mentions) while also putting rewatchable stuff on there as well, to keep it fresh and try to actually re-enjoy my favourites.

A suitable and mostly feature-similar to “RetroTV”, is the ErsatzTV project, built by an engineer working at Disney for streaming technologies!