24/7 Halloween Movies on My Own Cable Channel (Homelab - Ep. 0x00A)

Description

KTTY is back. Last time my homelab cable station was a loop: the Plex server watching its own HDMI output come back through a tuner card. This time it gets a real channel with a real schedule, something that plays at 3am whether or not anyone is watching.

The plan is over-engineered on purpose: ErsatzTV in a Podman container on a Proxmox VM (my first Quadlet file), streaming to an Intel N100 mini PC, whose HDMI goes into the QAM modulator, whose RF goes into the tuner card in Plex. Along the way the movies refuse to show up, the filler needs a fallback for its fallback, a systemd service fails for the dumbest possible reason, and halfway through the modulator config I find out which frequencies the thing has been sitting on this whole time. That part is not a joke.

Also: the faceplate comes off in the first thirty seconds. Stick around to see why.

Chapters 0:00 Why the faceplate is coming off 0:25 Pulling KTTY out of the rack 5:50 The plan (yes, it is over-engineered) 6:57 Prepping the VM: apt, Podman, timezone, spoopy movies 10:14 My first Quadlet file 15:51 Starting ErsatzTV under Podman 20:10 FFmpeg profile: copy, don’t transcode 22:21 “Path must exist” (it does) 25:33 Movies want subfolders: a shell loop 29:08 Collections, channel 2, and KTTY 2 Spoopy 31:29 Schedules, ads as filler, fallback filler 34:14 First playout, tested in QuickTime 35:04 The head end: an N100 named ktty-rx-n100 38:02 mpv: which HDMI port, which mode, which audio device 39:39 Into the DataTronix GUI 40:28 “I should not be doing this” 42:36 Moving to channels 8 and 9 43:42 Virtual channel 222.2 and a 7-character name 45:45 The ktty-head systemd service 50:40 Debugging the service 54:15 Plex rescan, and a guide in Spanish 55:34 It’s playing. It’s Metropolis. It’s a paternoster. 57:09 Right on the half hour 58:10 Why the faceplate came off 59:31 Wrap up 1:00:09 Bloopers

What’s in the box

• ErsatzTV (legacy v26.11.3): https://ersatztv.org
• Podman and Quadlet: https://podman.io
• mpv: https://mpv.io
• DataTronix DT-IPTV-QAM-ASI-4HC encoder/modulator: https://www.northamericancable.com
• Intel N100 mini PC as the head end
• Proxmox VE: https://www.proxmox.com
• Plex Live TV & DVR with a Hauppauge WinTV-HVR-1265 tuner card
• RabbitEars, for finding empty TV channels in your market: https://www.rabbitears.info
• Public domain features and ads from the Internet Archive and the Prelinger collection: https://archive.org

Have you ever found out a default setting was a lot worse than you thought? Tell me in the comments so I feel better about this one.

If you enjoyed this, consider subscribing. There are three more HDMI inputs on that box.

❤️ Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/cw/Questionable_Commands

#homelab #ErsatzTV #Podman #Plex #QAM #cabletv #selfhosted #Halloween