This idea should really be implemented to begin with. As someone who has a massive library of old Fox Kids/Jetix shows, it’d be amazing to properly re-create that experience for myself and others of actually watching the original channel as it used to be, with screen DOGs (digital on-screen graphics) and bumpers to effectively make a new version of Jetix per-say. Maybe even have next/now bumpers re-created for this sake, which would be pretty cool to create.
This app creates PseudoTV from Plex library on Android TV:
It is still in development so it lacks many features but it seems a good start.
This is a very long comment thread so not sure if anyone’s mentioned this but I wonder if it’d be possible to build something which creates the channels in an M3U format with a corresponding XMLTV guide. Then we can put it in to something like xTeVe and Plex would see it as a TV tuner.
How long do requests typically sit in this suggestion thread? This one is about to hit its five-year anniversary. Anyway, I’ve tried to get something to work with PseudoTV on Kodi, TBN-Plex, and Pseudo Channel, to great failure because I’m sadly not skilled in python and find it very difficult to learn. Something built into Plex proper would really be amazing, and like others have said, the final step to cord cutting.
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I’ve seen people bumping this thread for years, and I would still highly support any kind of way to fake linear tv channels within Plex.
100% agree, i set up my older family members with my plex server and they are so used to channel surfing they always say they don’t know what they want to watch if there was an interface that you could just connect to that looks more like the “guide” it would make is so much easier for the folks that are used to that method.
A couple days ago a user in Reddit posted a guide and now it’s on Github with several enhancements to achieve exactly what this thread is describing, it’s worth to take a look
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I’ve really been wanting a feature like this in Plex the last few months. The PlexTVChannel project on GitHub seems great but a complex setup. I’d love to see pseudo tv added as an official feature building off the existing DVR interface. Hope it’s something the dev team considers!
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Brand new one out that actually works. Its still in early Alpha and already works incredible… more posts in 3 weeks than this has had in 3 years.
Heres the link PseudeoTV-Plex - Create LiveTV channels from your Plex playlists
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I guess since this thread is 5 years old, it’s not exactly a priority. lol Shame too…
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Agreed Stryker, truly sad. So glad DEFENDORe has created one that works. I played with Pseudo all night and although there are some minor bugs and glitches its almost flawless as alpha for my setup. Its seriously like a dream come true. I can’t wait to see what a final release will be like… here’s to praying that a Plex update doesn’t break it in some way.
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Came here looking for exactly this feature: Primetime Playlists
I would love a way to add a few shows to a play list, and then have the playlist rotate to the next show after each episode.
So what are the chances of us getting this now that Plex has their own revenue generating service that fakes linear TV? I mean I can’t complain too much about what Plex is doing since it’s basically Pluto, which I thought was kinda neat but almost never actually watched. It’s still linear TV with random garbage I’m not interested in on 90% of the channels (thank goodness for RetroCrush).
I know Plex has to pay the bills, but now that they’ve put a lot of work into what’s basically this feature (make sure to have the server remember subtitle/audio preferences on a per-series basis!), I’d like to see it come to the original purpose of Plex - people with their own video libraries.
They have experimented with their own TV channels as part of a Hack Week, however no news really came out about it since the Live TV announcement. I assume the reason it wasn’t released was because it may favor pirating over Plex’s offerings and the viewership of those channels wouldn’t increase because everyone would already be making their own stations with their own IDs, bumpers, shows, etc.
There is a light that never goes out.
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I want this feature. I have my parents hooked up to my server and it was an absolute pain to get them to initially cut the cord and go to Netflix (and then eventually my server) because they didn’t want to have to spend the time looking for a show or a movie, they just wanted to turn on the TV and watch immediately. And honestly, sometimes, I agree with that mindset. Being able to craft your own personalised channels, from the content off your own server, and leave them on in the background or just channel surf would be an invaluable feature for Plex to have in its repertoire in my honest opinion.
I am not interested in Plex’s own channels. That defeats the purpose. I want to create my own.
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The case for PseudoTV (and better music video support):
Using DizqueTV + Xteve + Zap2XML with and HDhomerun OTA, I am able to ‘hack’ a solution that enables what I want Plex to do natively.
Basically using XTeve to merge the EPG from Zap2it + DisqueTV and create dummy schedules to be the source for the XMLTV for Plex manually.
Then adding each Tuner, selecting which source owns the stream to prevent a possible double (or even triple) encoding of streams.
One of the biggest limitations with this solution is not being able to share the PseudoTV channels outside the local network without adding to home. Another other is the balance of managing this solution with all the different components, it can easily get messed up - but when it works, it’s makes me happy.
I have also tested with Locast2Plex as well, and it can work with this method. Just didn’t need the same channels listed since I have an OTA.
For those interested, the metadata from the music videos was mostly pulled from IMDB using a third party software that creates a nfo file, then used XBMCnfoMoviesImporter. Those that were not found were manually created with information from wikipedia.
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+1
If there was a native way to do this on Plex this would be amazing. The limitations of the current method require transcoding for anything with subtitles. I am using a pi right now which requires me to direct play basically anything. If a native version could do this this would be a god send. This would make me watch my own content way more because sometimes I’m way too lazy to choose what to watch.
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+1
It would be really great, much easier for parents who hates choosing movies, they just watch what’s on tv.
I sometimes just don’t know what to watch. Looking through the traditional grid and finding something fun and jumping in at that point (with the option to start over) would be perfect. I’d make some genre channels and series channels to fill my grid.
I miss this experience from live TV. Also a solution built-in to Plex would hopefully avoid constantly re-encoding, etc if no one is watching… My understanding is that the existing third-party solutions constantly encode, stream, to Plex even if no one is watching, which is inefficient.
