Help creating my own home TV station (sort of)

Ghostly Clockwork

Hey everyone, I've a rather odd request, I've looked around online, but frankly, I don't even know what I'm looking for, So I thought you guys might be able to help me out.

Here's what I'm looking for. I have a ton of TV shows and whatnot on my comp, and I'd like a way to watch them all. Now, while I could just load up VLC, and set it on random, that would be a problem for shows like "Heroes" and "Terminator". What I'm looking for is a program or plugin that can think,

"Play, Random pick "Mythbusters" folder, Pick random episode. When done, random folder pick. Pick Terminator folder, last played was episode 3, play episode 4." and so on and so forth.

I've no idea if something like this is even out there, but if it is, I'd love to hear about it. Thanks in advance!

urahonky

Hmm. You could download a Winamp plugin for the videos, and then add all the directories into it's playlist and then set it to random. Would that do what you're looking for?

e: Ah, I see that you have it set to "last played was 3, so play 4". Hmm. Not sure if something like that exists.

Six

Create it yourself! Sounds like an interesting project.

Smurph

Six wrote: »

Create it yourself! Sounds like an interesting project.

Sounds like an awesome project actually. Vlc can play pretty much any stream, and you can use something like this free VOD server to play anything on demand. Personally I would probably use the libvlc dll to make a VLC-based custom media player that behaved the way you wanted it to, loading random shows based on what you watched last, etc.

Ghostly Clockwork

Hehe, sadly, I know nothing about how to bend VLC to my will, or how to create things like that...Hehe, My last programing was in Qbasic. I think it was a circle Are there any walkthroughs, and what level of skill do you need to have?

Smurph

Actually I totally misread your request. This is all on the local machine, right? Not over a network? never mind the streaming stuff then. You're just looking to script a media player to play thing in a random but not totally random fashion. This would be a simple console app that calls vlc with certain parameters after going through some logic to decide what to play. You're probably going to need to do some programming. If something exists that does this out of the box, I don't know about it.

Ghostly Clockwork

Smurph wrote: »

Actually I totally misread your request. This is all on the local machine, right? Not over a network? never mind the streaming stuff then. You're just looking to script a media player to play thing in a random but not totally random fashion. This would be a simple console app that calls vlc with certain parameters after going through some logic to decide what to play. You're probably going to need to do some programming. If something exists that does this out of the box, I don't know about it.

Damn, that's what I was afraid of...Programing...Wish i knew more about it, it'd be neat to set it up on a home network, you have your own customized TV station running stuff. Guess I'll just have to settle for picking it manually, like some kind of SAVAGE. What's next, bone clubs and raw meat?

Mmm...Meat...

Six

This would be a great opportunity to learn how to do some basic programming if it's something you're interested in.

Ghostly Clockwork

Eh, it's ok...what with med school I really don't have time to learn programing sadly. Stupid med school being difficult...I imagine I might get around to it later when I actually have a home network set up, but as of now, it's more of a curiosity than anything.

I'm actually a bit surprised that someone hasn't made something like that, what with people downloading TV eps all the time. I'd think it'd be something people might pay for, being able to set up their server to broadcast custom TV over the network.

Six

I imagine it's something that someone, somewhere has done. How good is your Google-fu?

Madpanda

hit f2 to rename the extension on episodes watched to aviw or something, takes only a few seconds and you clearly see what the next episode is, as it will have the vlc icon, renameds will not.

midgetspy

Why not use a Media Center like XBMC which will keep track of your shows, episodes, watched, unwatch, etc? It wouldn't just play shows at random, but it'd give you an interface with which you could choose any show you wanted at any time (which would be better? hehe)

Ghostly Clockwork

Sorry it's taken me so bloody long to get back to this thread, Damn you Med School! Why must you take up so much time?

Anywho, The reason i don't want to use XBMC or something like that is that in my wonderful dream world, I'd have a central server, and that server would be constantly streaming the program, so i could turn on the TV or something, and *Poof* It'd be playing whatever, with the option to pick a show or program. Something tells me that the programing for the script would be kinda simple, I just have no clue how to do it.