Tunarr: Create and configure live TV channels from media on your servers
34 comments
·April 12, 2025obviyus
krick
That sounds fun, is it computationally expensive? Is it, like, actually processing the stuff even if nobody's watching? I'm not gonna try it on my current NAS, because it's all HDDs and I can hear it in the room, so I mostly use it as "cold" storage, but your post really made me want to try it. Also, now that I'm thinking of it, must be pretty hard for HDDs too, if you don't use some dedicated all-SSD NAS specifically for that...
ertian
No, unless somebody starts a stream there's no computation. If nobody is watching, it's idle.
If somebody tunes in, the server figures out where to start the stream and begins streaming.
unixhero
/r/homelab and /r/homedatacenter called. We love computationally expensive.
thakoppno
> fond memories of cycling through channels as a child
One thing that’s missing is the low-latency old analog systems had changing channels. Has anyone figured out a way to achieve this in the digital era?
joezydeco
I worked on a DVB-H receiver back in the day and we tried to speed it up by having a complete second tuner in hardware and starting the acquisition on the next stream while decoding the first one.
thakoppno
That’s fun. I suppose flipping up channels is far more common than down, but presumably one direction would be faster with this solution.
wpm
Once you have the channels, the next step is to pick up a few old RF modulators and run your own cable TV network at home. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W7m7OW2xrJE
dantastic
This is awesome! This is what I'd like to do at home albeit with DVB-T.
I've seen a lot of clabretro's videos and am especially hooked on the token ring series. I don't know why since that was just outside of me starting to work on networking (we ran a 10-base-2 at home since my dad worked in networking) but he's so calm and a good story teller. Highly recommended channel!
doublerabbit
I recently bought an HDMI Transmitter and as my laptop's HDMI port doesn't output sound. I've rigged a Bluetooth RX/TX dongle plugged in to the headphone-out port which made me giddy in nerd. It's voodoo.
Being able to stream from my laptop to my TV in 1080p without any additional cables and using emulators for games is kind of dark magic.
I need to purchase a usb DAC and better quality BT streaming devices, creative a web-ui to finish the setup. But that was cool, would love to do something when I upgrade from an apartment especially with the 3x cable monitors.
Rebelgecko
Is latency noticable for games or NBD?
haunter
I'm backing up my Youtube favorites locally since 2018, so far 10k videos. I might try to use this because seems like would be a fun way to play them in the background on a second monitor.
VTimofeenko
I've been thinking about doing this. What's your setup?
madphilosopher
Not the OP, but I have a Postfix mail server running on my home media box that receives YouTube URLs sent to its special email address. Postfix passes the message to a Python script that parses out the URL and places it into a Redis queue. A second Python program, running as a daemon, watches the queue and then downloads the video using yt-dlp. I can also enqueue video URLs from the command line.
This is the command that the daemon runs to request 720p, for example:
command = 'yt-dlp --write-info-json -f "bv*[height<=720]+ba" --output "out.%%(ext)s" --merge-output-format mp4 "%s"' % urldarkwater
Sounds like how RMS browses the web. Nice setup, by the way.
yard2010
You live in the future
haunter
yt-dlp
I just parse the URLs from the liked playlist every couple of days with a Chrome extension then simply run the app.
yt-dlp would work automatically too with logins but I'm always too nervous that Google would just straight up ban my account for whatever reasons. So I rather do it in a more manual way.
add-sub-mul-div
I run a flask app with an endpoint that takes a video URL and runs yt-dlp. I have a bookmarklet that submits the URL of the current video page I'm on to the web service.
Also when I'm in NewPipe on the phone I can go to a video and share the URL to an app that forwards it to the web service.
matthewcanty
My dad, who passed away 2023, left a stack of over 100 VHS tapes full of 80s TV. It’s mostly music (esp. bass guitar orientated), steam trains, photography and I think this would make the perfect way to digest that content.
Thanks for sharing.
aspenmayer
Please consider uploading the tapes to Internet Archive, YouTube, an open directory, etc.
smegger001
I have been threatening to do this for a while just put all of my dvd rips on a server on make channels based on genera scifi (star trek stargate etc) cartoon (loony toons popeye...) sitcoms (scrubs HowIMetYourMother Frasier Cheer) all of my kids horrible shows on another. i often find i end up flipping thorugh netflix with option paralysis when i mostly want background noise this would be nice.
kilroy123
I recommend it! I did that and started using https://www.quasitv.app, which is similar. It completely removes the paralysis you're talking about.
hypercube33
After using pluto.tv for a while this inspired me to look into some HD rf modulators and get this project going
nighthawk454
Does anyone know how this compares to ErsatzTV?
unixhero
Yes!!! I have been wanting to make this for a long time. I want to make 1990s TV channels and have them on TVs around the house.
I just love the feeling this gives. I'm even almost tempted to add some K-Mart infomercials vhs rips:)
digitaltinfoil
What a dream!! This is something I have wanted for a long time, and can't wait to set this up
add-sub-mul-div
"If you want to play the TV channels in Plex using the spoofed HDHR, Plex Pass is required."
FYI with ErsatzTV, the one I use, (which is great) a Plex Pass isn't needed.
byronvickers
If you've got it working then obviously it must be possible, but I'm a touch confused because the ErsatzTV documentation says "A Plex Pass is required for ErsatzTV to work with Plex." (https://ersatztv.org/docs/user-guide/configure-clients)
Is it possible that you had this working in the past but Plex has since removed the functionality from their free tier?
add-sub-mul-div
I've never had a Plex Pass and I currently use ErsatzTV through Plex daily. I also tried out Tunarr this afternoon and got it working. Though I'll be sticking with ErsatzTV.
floathub
Now if you set up some DVR software to record the channel ...
curtisszmania
[dead]
I tried this for a while with ErsatzTV and really loved it. I don’t have cable anymore but I remember fond memories of cycling through channels as a child.
I set up a food channel that would cycle through Masterchef and a few travel cooking shows, one for anime and one for Bollywood movies.
It was incredibly enjoyable. I could just put on a channel after work without having to consciously make a decision on what to watch. Just watch whatever’s on the channel and switch over to something else if it didn’t click!
Definitely going to try this out on my NAS.