Configurable content scheduling system

[zshall]

Test:

Open the guide channel and the program guide will show the current time, three potential timeslots (now, now + 30 minutes, now + 1 hour) rounded down to the nearest 30 min mark, and some listings.

Expected results:

The listings correspond with the time slot value in the guide.

Actual results:

The first few listings are used for each channel without regard to time slots.

Notes:

We may want to change the time slot value in the guide to actual times of day. Since this data isn't expected to change too often we'd probably want both a date and time, and if date isn't present we'd use just the time.

If nothing is playing at a given time the channel would have a default value such as OFF AIR or NO SCHEDULED PROGRAMMING.

[zshall]

When planning the scheduling system in version 2 we'll tackle this issue. Partial support is here in the form of generating channels based on their current content, but proper timeslots are not yet fully thought out.

[zshall]

Been working on this issue but it keeps growing in complexity and scope. This will end up being its own project called Television Simulator Scheduler.

Scheduler is planned to be a separate server application that provides synchronized playback for TVS instances in the form of a "watch party" style server. In that, it will keep track of what should be currently playing and how far we are along in it, and what's up next. TVS will be updated to include the ability to connect to multiple instances of Scheduler at once, and will include a new content engine, src, which will grab info about what's supposed to be playing right now and display it. I'm not planning on creating m3u8 streams or transcoding video at this time. The channels that are created in scheduler should be able to play endlessly and content should be broken into timeslots which can be displayed by the guide.

Scheduler will be designed to schedule any type of content engine that TVS is able to display, not just video (though not all content will have definitive runtimes or be able to play "in progress"). Since TVS loads its configuration from a file currently we'll just send the JSON of what to play over the network and replace it when new data comes in.

I'm currently in the designing and prototyping phase for Scheduler. There's no ETA but I'll share more as I know more!

[zshall]

The Scheduler project is well underway at this point and has been renamed to Television Simulator Studio. It's a companion server for TVS that acts as a media server and content scheduler. TVS Studio imports media files and scans them using ffmpeg / ffprobe to determine their duration and whether they can be played on the web as-is, and converts them ahead of time to optimized webm files if not. The approach I chose relies on HTTP range requests rather than realtime encoding, and putting logic into both the client and the server to enable synchronized playback. This has a few advantages since the playback isn't limited to one type of media. We can playback a "stream" of images, videos, IFrames, etc. just by describing what TVS should play next. After your files are encoded you won't need much in the way of server specs to run TVS Studio since it generates all schedule data for each channel a week in advance and simply serves each optimized media file at the time it would be on as a static file. There are drawbacks too to this approach like the fact that the synchronized stream doesn't play back in standard media players and you'll potentially be spending a lot of CPU time up front to encode the files first.

Together with improvements to the program guides and OSDs, TVS 6.0.0 will be released alongside TVS Studio's initial 1.0.0 release when it's ready.

[zshall]

With Television Simulator 6.0 released we've got partial support for this; Studio alpha testers can integrate TVS Studio in as an external source. You can also define an external source in a JSON file so that you can make a channel that updates dynamically. I'm currently writing documentation for this and continuing to iterate on true scheduling support but here's some preliminary documentation: https://docs.tvs.gcpw.art/reference/channel-info/#defining-content-from-external-sources