The Little Traffic Cone That Could

So busy day! As always. I got up and wrote a little stroll down memory lane on the group blog, since it is the 2nd mariversary, after all. But that’s not what I’m here to talk about! No, I’m here to talk about my idea for BRINGING BACK ANTENNA TV. Not the channel that shows like Bewitched reruns or whatever, but uh…the concept. The state of mind. Lemme explain a bit.

I like the idea of TV a lot. I have at least two good essays in me about how choice leads to us feeling overwhelmed and paralyzed. Modern life is defined by unnecessary choices that we waste clock cycles on, and this naturally extends to our media. Fun experiment: sit down with someone as they flip through Netflix and see how long it takes them to find something. Despite their queue being wide on screen, they’ll likely take a lot of time flipping through for that one choice that looks anything more than passable or serviceable.

In the old days of analog TV, you really did only have a few local affiliates to choose from. Not necessarily only the big three, that being ABC, NBC, and CBS here. The 50s gave us the shitshow that was the Dumont Network, PBS existed over-the-air starting in the 70s, and weird, specialty UHF stations (especially low-power ones) littered various markets across the US. Cable offered us the promise of more channels, but whether or not we watched any of them remains to be seen. Once again, more choice isn’t always better.

In any event, while it’s nice to be able to listen to any song at any point the moment it hits you (hell, I queued up Maximo Park to drop into this blog post before I decided against it), I’m also really fond of not having that choice on occasion. Something to just turn on and shut off to, and bonus points if it’s something I actually like–very appealing.

Since I was little, I’ve also had a fascination with actually having a TV channel of my own. Not starring me necessarily, but with content of my choosing. This bled into a general interest in broadcasting, then unlicensed broadcasting like pirate radio and pirate TV, and later into things like number and polytone stations and weather radio. Basically, this is the kinda shit I was fascinated by when I was 10 years old:

Like many ideas, this one came by way of idle chitchat with Caby. We got to talking about the news media being a plague, and that shifted over to a general discussion on TV and how modern channels don’t quite do it for me. They’re too homogenized, too modern, without enough local flavor or stuff I’m personally interested in. The idea of a program generating “TV channels” then came up:

Caby and I discussing a playlist generator for "broadcast"

I wasn’t really surprised to see that nothing existed quite like this just yet. When most people want to stream content over a network, they mean with a file listing, something like an SMB share. AKA, choice. No choice. Just zoning out. I want something that makes a proper, 24/7 feed of local content streamable over the air or even online potentially.

So here’s how I conceptualize it. Thankfully, VLC offers playlists through the XSPF format, which is the crux of this setup. XSPF is just XML, which means it’s really trivial to get a program to generate a listing of videos. So you have your big library of content ready to go, movies, TV shows, documentaries, hell, music videos between shows would be pretty great. (TeenNick used to do that, is how I found Vampire Weekend.)

Each type of content would be sorted, likely into folders, and the program would take stock of the inventory, pick a random set of videos, and generate that day’s broadcast schedule. At that point, you could probably get as creative as you want with it, airing late-night movies, blocks of sleepy documentary stuff in the afternoon, segregate it out by day of the week, anything you want. Things like station ID cards, sign-offs, and overnight “transmitter tests” can also be part of the playlist. All the minutia.

The “broadcasting” end would then be taken over by VLC streaming from the command line, likely through some kinda shell script. Come the switchover every day at midnight, a new day of “broadcasting” would begin with the previously-generated XSPF playlist. This can then be received by just about anything that’ll take a streaming media signal, 24/7. Hell, if you wanna get really retro, I see no reason you couldn’t take a PC, hook it up to a CRT over composite or RF, and zone out that way.

This setup just plain appeals to me. No longer is the idea of a huge DVD collection or a streaming service daunting, off-putting. You don’t even need to have seen the movie to incorporate it into the setup. You’ll watch it when the program picks it. Boxsets of cartoons are lovely too, but watching an entire season of, I dunno, The Angry Beavers in one go doesn’t quite appeal to me. But an episode or two might. The program provides.

I don’t really have a good media server or device to receive streams, but I wanted to give this a shot with what I had. I quickly made up a playlist of five Oddity Archive episodes I had downloaded and got VLC to stream them over HTTP.

VLC streaming over localhost

Surprisingly, this did work! The playlist did start playing, and I was able to open another window and see it working on localhost. Even better, despite it being an anemic little thing, I even got the stream working on my Wii through WiiMC, which needed a config tweak and a firewall tweak to get up and running. (Though, like I said, it’s anemic, so it buffers a ton before it plays anything back.)

Now comes the (only slight) bad news though. VLC seems to have major problems transcoding stuff in real time. When I played back the stream even locally, it took a lot of time to buffer and would only intermittently play. When I turned off video transcoding, the stream played back seamlessly, though the Wii stopped being able to handle it for whatever reason.

Audio’s also been really finicky during these tests. Dunno if the container can only handle audio in a specific kind of format, but when I tried to transcode to MP3 or let the original video’s audio pass through, no sound would come through the stream at all:

VLC showing no audio being received through the stream

It seems setting the audio codec to “MPEG Audio” (not MP3 or AAC, somehow) makes it work, and pretty flawlessly. Nothing else will do. Dunno, but hey, encouraging. At this point, I imagine a lot of my technical hangups can be fixed by streaming over another protocol or just plain having more powerful hardware to throw at it.

Either way, I’m pleased with these tests. Frankly, the idea can go as far as your imagination. Like I said, you could potentially have the program detect a short episode and fill the remaining time with music videos or short films. The chain could get more complicated if you just wanted to use VLC as a playback device and have the streaming handled by a program that can actually generate graphics, say for bits of dead air or perhaps as a simulated overnight community billboard type thing with music playing.

Who knows, maybe I’ll get my damn TV channel after all.

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