Retro TV: Live 24/7 Vintage Cable TV Network on Raspberry Pi
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During the pandemic lockdown, an old iPad became the catalyst for a three-year long passion project: transforming it into a 24/7 recreation (and parody) of 8...

cross-posted from: https://compuverse.uk/post/194017

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!

  • @[email protected]English
    14•1 year ago

    I don’t have time to maintain an open source project

    So just upload the files and let people fork it on GitHub. I don’t understand this attitude. I’d love to have something like this.

    • TopHatOPAEnglish
      4•1 year ago

      Exactly my thoughts. I was looking to see if he had any possible contact options to ask him to consider that, but haven’t been able to find any to this date.

  • @[email protected]English
    2•1 year ago

    It sounds like I grew up in the exact same time frame as the video creator! He did such an incredible job, my god I’m envious! On the prevue channel, he even got the way the times scroll up and then push the top column’s to more current times! I had forgotten all about that little detail! He must have put insane amount of time into getting this all to work, my hats off to him!

    • TopHatOPAEnglish
      2•1 year ago

      The Prevue channel definitely wow’d me with using an SQL database for the data and SDL to render that.