Setting up something like a cron job is trivial, getting it to stream files from a particular folder, on a channel I can access on demand, is the trick.
Ideally I want to be able to change the input on my television, any time I want, to my personal streaming channel which is constantly running the schedule I’ve defined.
The one time I tried streaming I just piped ffmpeg output through icecast and that worked, but it took some reading of the ffmpeg wiki to find the right options. You might even be able to point icecast to the folder directly without ffmpeg. I needed ffmpeg because it was transcoding from a webcam. On the playback side you’d again use ffmpeg to stream the icecast channel to your computer’s hdmi output, and wire that to your TV. I’m still going with 10 line shell script, but maybe I’d use python to avoid too much shell cleverness.
Added: maybe you don’t even need icecast. Its purpose is to fan out a single input to multiple clients. You can even cascade them across a bunch of cheap VPS into a do-it-yourself youtube with 1000s of simultaneous viewers.
That would likely work if the intent was to watch files locally, and that’s not the goal. The goal is to stream them out to something viewable on a television.
A DLNA server can do the streaming, but not the scheduling and it won’t run continuously.
That is like a 10 line bash script? Well maybe a little more but not much. Start here: https://linux.die.net/man/1/at
Setting up something like a cron job is trivial, getting it to stream files from a particular folder, on a channel I can access on demand, is the trick.
Ideally I want to be able to change the input on my television, any time I want, to my personal streaming channel which is constantly running the schedule I’ve defined.
The one time I tried streaming I just piped ffmpeg output through icecast and that worked, but it took some reading of the ffmpeg wiki to find the right options. You might even be able to point icecast to the folder directly without ffmpeg. I needed ffmpeg because it was transcoding from a webcam. On the playback side you’d again use ffmpeg to stream the icecast channel to your computer’s hdmi output, and wire that to your TV. I’m still going with 10 line shell script, but maybe I’d use python to avoid too much shell cleverness.
Added: maybe you don’t even need icecast. Its purpose is to fan out a single input to multiple clients. You can even cascade them across a bunch of cheap VPS into a do-it-yourself youtube with 1000s of simultaneous viewers.
Seems like it would be pretty easy to set up some cron job that would change a symlink to a folder every hour and just run programs from that symlink.
That would likely work if the intent was to watch files locally, and that’s not the goal. The goal is to stream them out to something viewable on a television.
A DLNA server can do the streaming, but not the scheduling and it won’t run continuously.