I made a show shuffler that shuffles shows in order
18 comments
·March 30, 2025MountainMan1312
jerf
Truly random shuffling is not very good in practice, really.
Way back in the day, before the current trend towards throwing all your MP3s in a pile and using id3 tags to hopefully sort it out, I had my MP3s in a directory structure by rough genre and album. I wrote myself a shuffler that would honor the directory structure; it would tend to stay in the same directory and use a record of the most recently played songs to avoid repeats, and only jump out if it needed to, or with some relatively smaller probability. Then there was a relatively smaller probability it would continue jumping up through the directories.
The idea is, if you have a multi-genre collection, you may want a "shuffle" but it can be jarring to whiplash between the various genres on every single song as a fully random shuffle would do. So shuffles would tend to honor albums, then honor genre, so that there was a small chance you might flip from techno to classical, and if you did, it would tend to stay in classical for a while, before flipping to pop music or whatever.
I do sort of miss it and sort of simulate it nowadays by just being a bit heavyhandedly intentional about the playlists I make for the day.
stavros
I, too, have a bunch of legally ripped shows, yes.
stavros
A few years ago I got a Chromecast, so I made a program that would cast one episode after the other of all the shows I had. It was fun to switch to the Chromecast and be in the middle of some show (I'd already watched them all), but it did have the issue you mention (it would play S02E03 and then S10E22), but it was fun to have my own TV channel, basically.
captn3m0
I want this but as an Emby/Jellyfin plugin.
Hojojo
There is ErsatzTV which works with Jellyfin (see the clients page) https://ersatztv.org/docs/intro
It was pretty janky the last time I tried it last year though. When it worked, it was awesome, but when things didn't work quite correctly (or at all), it was frustrating and difficult to figure out how to fix.
s900mhz
I thought the same! I’m not sure if it would have to be a client or server side implementation though.
Might have to be both, like a new simulate TV mode.
Larrikin
The ideal setup for this would be faux channels on Plex but I haven't found anything that is quite right.
My ideal setup would be channels generated by shows in a random order like this. But I don't actually want my hard drives constantly spinning and Plex playing to nobody, which is what the channels seem to do. It would just track time and when you tune in, then it actually streams to you.
Mix in some commercials from 20+ years ago between shows optionally.
ryanmcbride
In addition to the other ones listed here there's https://github.com/vexorian/dizquetv But I can't speak directly on it because setting it up has been on my list of things to do for like a month lol
resize2996
a fork/rewrite: https://github.com/chrisbenincasa/tunarr
(not an endorsement, I just found it digging around.)
Larrikin
I set this up. It's a little rough using the binaries for the setup and it's obviously early, but this seems to have everything I was looking for. Thanks!
goosedragons
I've been looking into this too. I think a couple options are ErsatzTV and PseudoTV in Kodi. Both seem to only stream when you're watching, but they "keep playing" when you're not.
walthamstow
ErsatzTV is great. It only plays when you're watching, the rest of the time it's not doing anything. I tune into my Seinfeld channel most evenings.
Gamemaster1379
Check out pseudoTV
add-sub-mul-div
The aforementioned ErsatzTV has a Discord server where the community will have some links to collections of nostalgic commercials.
onionisafruit
I expected to see an April fools joke about a no-op shuffler but found something pretty neat instead. I don’t usually have enough unwatched shows that I would want to shuffle them, but if I did I would want them in order like this.
xeromal
I don't think it would be super useful for current shows but I could see this working nicely for older shows you like to rewatch like Seinfeld, Tom and Jerry, Friends, Mash, etc.
MountainMan1312
One of the playlists I made with this actually includes Seinfeld, Friends, and MASH. Also includes Andy Griffith, Blackadder, Sanford and Son, The Munsters, and WKRP in Cincinatti. Overall an extremely cozy channel.
I have a bunch of (legally) ripped shows. I use VLC to watch them. I like to make big playlists full of many shows like a TV channel.
I hate the fact that when I shuffle, the shows end up in any old order. I could have S8E2 right before S1E1. Not cool.
So I made one that shuffles shows but maintains episode order between them, and takes number of episodes in each show into account to get an even spread so the playlist feels the same throughout. If a show has a ton of episodes it will show up more. Less shows up less. All my testing resulted in the top of the list looking almost identical to the bottom of the list. Mission accomplished.
It works by deploying symlinks to a playlist folder, all named 0, 1, 2, 3, etc. Slap all those symlinks in the VLC playlist and you got yourself a TV channel.
I made it for me, so it's designed for a specific file layout. It could be easily adapted to fit other organization methods.
I have plans to expand on it. I want to add functionality to detect multi-part episodes and keep them together, as well as some kind of "too many of one show in a row" feature.