I made an app to create live TV stations from your existing Plex playlists.
Check it out here: pseudotv-plex
24 Likes
Every time I see new third party for plex make’s me happy… So little for happiness.
OK. What’s the real use of this. Can app create live tv station from external .m3u list to live tv channels?
This will allow you to stream select playlists in your library as LiveTV channels. PseudoTV-Plex will show up as a tuner in Plex, and any playlist in your library (including Smart Playlists) with a description/summary starting with the keyword “pseudotv” will show up as a channel in Plex LiveTV.
This could be useful for viewing parties, or if you just wanted to brainlessly watch a TV show without having to decide which episode to watch.
I’m not a professional programmer or anything, I just do it as a hobby. I would love for somebody more skilled and experienced to take the project/idea and run with it. It could definitely use some polish lol. There’s bound to be plenty of bugs.
O.K. Thanks
This is quite slick Dan. Thanks tons. I got it up and running despite my complete lack of understanding npm. I am running into a couple issues. I understand you may not actively develop this just yet but wonder if you can help or give some ideas.
The channels don’t randomize for some of the smart playlists. Not sure if thats one of your mentioned bugs or not
Also, there is a stutter about every minute or two. Might be the age of my system not able to handle some transcoding but it does work fine for plex in general just not the way pseudo tv is working. Could it be the transcoding from VLC that its having trouble with possibly? Any ideas on how to make it possibly run smoother?
Again, thanks so much for this… its an amazing start for you and others to really build on. We have needed this forever.
PC Nerd.
Oh and one other thing, maybe I am ignorant on this one but is there a way to view the guide while watching a show? I can’t seem to see it like live tv guides. I am using firetv.
No problem, I’ve always thought this would be a cool feature to have in Plex and got sick of waiting lol.
Smart playlists and normal ones are handled the same. Upon startup, it should be storing your “pseudotv” marked playlist in the same order they appear in Plex. By default, we loop though the playlist until a minimum of 12 hours of EPG is stored. Maybe Plex has some sorta special mechanism to handle Smart Playlists and their order, I’ll look into that. I’ve also been thinking about somehow incorporating a randomize feature, by adding “randomize” to a playlists summary… I’m sure that wouldn’t be hard to implement.
The update sequence is a little more involved however. Upon detecting a “pseudotv” marked playlist change in Plex, we look at the current scheduled program in the EPG, store it, then begin looping though the playlist starting at the index of the current scheduled program. However if the current scheduled program for the channel has been removed from the playlist, we just loop though the playlist like normal, making the start time of the first show now.
I hope that makes sense lol.
As for the stuttering, try to configure your settings in VLC. I found that with hardware acceleration enabled, I got choppy video. But its really taxing on the CPU. Maybe you might get the opposite results enabling it haha. I made it so VLC would not transcode at all if Plex found a version of the media with isOptimizedForStreaming set to true (which I think is any h264/acc video). I have had some issues with that as well tho, I get the occasional black screen with audio playing.
I really wanted to go with FFMPEG but using VLC was just to damn easy to setup lol. I plan to incorporate ffmpeg at some point, which I think will improve stability and performance. It also would be really cool if there was a way make Plex do the transcoding instead, that way ffmpeg or vlc would just remux video on the fly to a “live” stream.
I don’t have a FireTV so I’m not certain, but my Apple TV does not allow for me to browse the guide while watching TV. Only Plex Web and Plex Media Player from my experience.
It is quite cool… I truly hope you and or others get in on this and make it something decent. Plex just isn’t listening to 5 years of people asking for this.
The playlist random thing makes sense now. I was thinking into it more than needed. It would still be cool to have a randomize option like PseudoTV Live (Kodi addon from Lunatixz). That setup works pretty good but its even more of a stretch than something a little closer to native to Plex like yours is.
I have been fighting with the black screen sound only issue off and on today. No idea what causes it really. Theory tells me its the way VLC is sending the video stream to plex but I am basically talking out of my rear there. 
All of my videos are mp4 so I am guessing plex is streaming like normal with that file type. I have seen the setting that I can change to optimize for each video but they all seem to be “Optimized for Mobile” currently. Not sure if that could be causing it as well or if I need to change that?
Well, thanks again so much for this. It’s pretty cool and again also hope someone helps you run with it to make it something even more cool than it is right now.
This looks awesome and I cant wait to try it. I run my PMS on my Synology. Can this run on synology?
1 Like
Some new improvements have been made to the app.
-
There’s a new WebUI to manually trigger channel updates,
-
Auto update the Plex EPG and DVR channel mappings.
-
Your Plex Server will now handle transcoding (h264/aac)
-
Your choice of either VLC or FFMPEG for mpegts remuxing/streaming
DEFENDORe, Man I am so pumped to see this … just came back here this morning and saw your update. Before I try the new stuff, did the pausing stop after using FFMPEG and direct trans from plex?
How exactly to I install this?
1 Like
Just a quick update, I made some changes to the app. FFMPEG will now transcode your media to MPEG2 format rather then use Plex transcoding. Continuous playback now works, and I also added the ability to embed commercials inside your programs. Channels and app settings are now managed via the web UI.
I also added prepackaged binaries for Windows, Mac and Linux. *note: you still need ffmpeg
Optional arguments for the executables: --host, --port, --database, --xmltv
See the project readme for more info…
I also added a Dockerfile so people running Docker can create their own image/container rather easily. ffmpeg is downloaded and installed when building the image…
How to get started…
- Start the PseudoTV app
- Configure FFMPEG via web UI
- Add your Plex Server(s) via web UI
- Create a channel via web UI
- Add the PseudoTV tuner to Plex. Use the
.pseudotv/xmltv.xmlfile for EPG data when adding the Tuner - Enjoy PeusdoTV
How does it handle channel surfing? The other PseudoTV apps I’ve used always had bad delays when switching between channels. I always thought one solution would be to the the channel switching is on the back side in the ffmpeg if you can. In theory if you do it right it could be seamless. Maybe cover any delay with a little static.
I’m a professional program who has been dreaming about something like this for a while but never had the time to do it.
My solutions always included using the Plex api to stream to another app though. I thought that might be the only way to make sure you can channel surf, playing 3 streams at once but just showing one and jumping between them. Of course if the user totally switches channels you still will have a delay.
Just recently I was looking at ws-avc-player and maybe wrapping the whole thing in an electron app that uses google cast. I’ve also thought of doing some kind of caching inside the app to make channel surfing possible. Like downloading an hours worth of every possible channel. Although I’d love this to work with large channel numbers.
I got pretty close to getting it to run but I kept getting errors.
It seems like my version of ffmpeg in the docker image didn’t like the settings. I’m not sure what that was since I didn’t go into the docker image to check. I couldn’t get my local version to run for some reason due to node problems.
FFMPEG ERROR {
code: 1,
cmd: '-headers User-Agent: ffmpeg -threads 4 -ss 12.957 -t 3418.808 -re -i http://walrus.wonderland.house:32400/library/parts/285049/1220493600/file.wmv?X-Plex-Token=Uj1Ypq-DnNz5ZDVXa-t2 -c:v mpeg2video -c:a ac3 -ac 2 -ar 48000 -b:a 192k -b:v 10000k -s 1280x720 -r 30 -flags cgop+ilme -sc_threshold 1000000000 -minrate:v 10000k -maxrate:v 10000k -bufsize:v 1000k -f mpegts -output_ts_offset 0 pipe:1'
}
The channel got added but when I went to play ffmpeg threw an error.
Try increasing your buffer size in the UI for ffmpeg. Thtas what I did and it worked…so far…
I had this working for a while tonight, now I’m getting this error:
HTTP server running on port: http://127.0.0.1:8000
Failed to write the xmltv.xml file. Something went wrong. Check your output directory via the web UI and verify file permissions? Error: No program found; find algorithm â– â– â– â– â– â– up
at Object.getCurrentProgramAndTimeElapsed (C:\snapshot\pseudotv-plex\dist\src\helperFuncs.js:48:41)
at _writePrograms (C:\snapshot\pseudotv-plex\dist\src\xmltv.js:66:26)
at C:\snapshot\pseudotv-plex\dist\src\xmltv.js:27:47
at new Promise ()
at Object.WriteXMLTV (C:\snapshot\pseudotv-plex\dist\src\xmltv.js:12:10)
at Object.updateXML (C:\snapshot\pseudotv-plex\dist\index.js:47:11)
at Object. (C:\snapshot\pseudotv-plex\dist\index.js:94:15)
at Module._compile (pkg/prelude/bootstrap.js:1320:22)
at Object.Module._extensions…js (internal/modules/cjs/loader.js:1176:10)
at Module.load (internal/modules/cjs/loader.js:1000:32)
at Function.Module._load (internal/modules/cjs/loader.js:899:14)
at Function.Module.runMain (pkg/prelude/bootstrap.js:1375:12)
at internal/main/run_main_module.js:18:47
I was able to get the stream working, but I was unable to get Plex to recognize it as a tuner. Has anyone else come across this issue?
notanewbie,
Thats the exact issue I am having. It will let me continue even though it doesn’t bring up a tuner or it shows for a few seconds then starts searching again.
