[mythtv-users] video scheduling for local/public access cable channel

Ian Connor ian.connor at gmail.com
Wed Dec 29 17:24:36 UTC 2004


I work with a nonprofit public access TV station and we are looking
for video scheduling system to broadcast our local channel.

We have a very limited budget and if MythTV might work out for us (our
town is very small and so is the budget that comes with that).

We will be producing a content ourselves (probably via a macintosh as
well as from video tape through traditional video editing means). We
will also be pulling information that is free to rebroadcast from
sattelite feeds (there is a lot of content that you can rebroadcast
through cable TV as a non-profit).

So, I would imagine that we would rip the video all to hard disk,
download the video files produced on the macintosh and then schedule
it to be played back. We only have one channel to fill so the system
does not need to be too fancy. I noticed that MythTV can control a
number of TVs - so could we have the cable channel set up as one of
these?

When we are not playing content, we have a public services board that
displays a little slide show of what is going on in the town. I can
see MythTV allows you to show photo slides through your TV - this idea
would work well if we could automate when the slide would show and
when and what videos would show.

The system now is not software based at all. We have a controlling box
that does nothing more than turn on video tapes and switch to show
that tape. We program the video switching device when to rewind, when
to play and when to stop - so to my mind doing this all on a computer
should not be that much different and I hope it would not cost too
much while giving us more flexibility. I hope that we would be able to
control it and automate it from there.

However, the question is where to start and if MythTV can do some of
the job with little or no coding changes.

Thanks for any advice you might have,

Ian Connor
http://www.concordtv.org/


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