[Wrongdog Recons] suffers from a severe case of nostalgia. His earlier project simulated broadcast TV, and he was a little surprised at how popular the project was on GitHub. As people requested features, he realized that he could create a simulated cable box and emulate a 1990s-era cable TV system. Of course, you also needed a physical box, which turned into another project. You can see more about the project in the video below.
Inside is, unsurprisingly, a Raspberry Pi. Then you have to pretend to be a cable TV scheduler and organize your different video files for channels. You can interleave commercials and station breaks.
One addition was a scheduler so you could set up things like football games only play during football season. You can also control timing so you don’t get beer commercials during Saturday morning cartoons.
We were especially impressed with the program guide channel that lets you see what’s playing, just like an old-style cable system. The simulation even plays trash TV in the morning and bizarre commercials post-midnight.
If you are tired of having to decide what to watch, this might be for you. If you want to simulate the earliest pay TV, you’ll need a coin slot. We wonder if the simulator could do a local origination weather channel.
brownie points if you use fake commercials from the likes of robocop and others.
I would buy that for a dollar
Who needs fake commercials when you can do “Cal worthington and my dog spot” commercials?!
i mean there are commercials that i would classify as high art. super bowl commercials for example. but if ocp comes up offering the latest convenience, so much the better. kind of mixed them in.
there was this alt history movie mocumentary where the south won the civil war (c.s.a. or some such). it had fake commercials interspersed throughout with products from a pro slavery modern world. lots of wtf momements.
the robocop tv series had some good ones as well. comedy shows (snl and others) sometimes also had fake commercials.
The brother of a coworker does storage unit auction buying and reselling. Last year he scored a storage unit that had an interesting bit of kit. Someone had wired 50 raspberry pi’s to 50 atsc modulators. After an afternoon of tinkering around we managed to get the thing up and running and attached to a set of NAS drives that were also in the storage unit. It was pretty cool.
Digging through the other items in the unit he figured out its intended purpose. There was a bunch of paperwork and brochures for a summer camp. It seems the previous owner was setting up a makeshift cable TV network for the camp, I think when it came time to create 50 channels worth of screened, censored, and scheduled content they realized just how much they had really bitten off and scrapped the project.
We played around with the system for a few hours to test the functionality of it all. Then they sold off the parts on ebay for a tidy sum. Those modulators sell for $300+ new.
I know WAY too much about the Jerrold 400/450 cable boxes and how the headend authorises them to descramble the various channels. Useless information now, but lots of fun figuring it out at the time.
Our hometown cable company used the Jerrold boxes…..it brings back memories of the occasional late nights staring at the scrambled signal of the porn channel…
I think I saw a nipple!…never mind it was just an elbow.
Growing up in the 80s was wild.
There was a smaller chip in a socket that when I pulled it out it slipped and one end was still in place and a clear picture was on the screen! I found out from others that a diode in the last 2 pins was all it took to make it clear. This was Jerrold stuff a box with a 30 or so position switch to tune. We’d run longer cables around the room and have chair side tuning without remote control, instead of “set top” operation.
That was a 32×8 PROM that held the box’s network address.
Reminds me of how my friends and I spent a lot of time on earlier versions of the “dark web” trying to hack the smart cards old satellite TV boxes used. We got it to work a few times but it was never permanent. We’re talking late 90s early 00s era hardware, so the boxes were still using phone lines to order pay-per-view movies.
Once Bit Torrent really got up and running directly pirating the content we wanted was way easier.
Nostalgia for the (mostly and reasonably) well-made media content, why yes.
Translation – during the heydays of the analog era (I’d say good strech, 1950s through must be mid-1980s) it took quite an investment to set up and run a TV or a cable channel. Investment meant selection of the talent and experience, and also there were entire sub-industries embedded within the industry, technology needed R&D and engineers, scripts needed writers, studios needed personnel, news needed good-looking anchors people will like, make up artists, etc etc. It was a huge industrial complex, partially inherited from the radio days, and had quite a competition – Hollywood, so it had to stay on its toes (so did Hollywood). Tidbit – just like the music recording studios had cadres of part-time recording musicians and stacks of pre-recorded albums they could sell, TV studios had cadres of actors and pre-recorded programs, so there was quite a pool of extra content to draw off of in case “regular programming” falls short and gets pulled off the air. Those stacks of extra content was also getting aged rather fast, so HAD to be used somewhere, somehow, hence, some programs were nearly free to air, pre-recorded and edited, just give us some advertising money and we will air it tonight.
Rewind to the MP3 revolution and the massive fallout from it, not just the music recording studios, ANYTHING that had to do with the media content was collapsing, directly or indirectly, and this included the extra content that was suddenly no longer needed (or worthy keeping around, as much of it was aged). Only the largest most-entrenched behemoths survived, GMs/Fords of the industry, and they consolidated what hasn’t fell apart just yet, and trashed the rest. Now we are down to what, two or three mega-corporations controlling/reselling pretty much the vast majority of the media content. (obviously, for-profit ones; the rest is insignificant in comparison and barely make a splash). Archived content … editors, what editors, a high school graduate with more or less good command of english language can edit anything.
Though, I am an optimist, and I think that we are actually in the midst of reinventing good media content, oddly enough, by direct popular vote no less (what’s popular on them youtube/tiktok/etc); however, comparing this with the mid-1980s is unfair – far, far less talent, far, far more artificial/superficial/unclear/odd, etc etc. The content had changed quite a great deal since then, and while the idea of unlimited access to anything under the sun is liberating, however with it comes its predictable evil twin – THE NOISE. Of course the noise level was about the same during the analog era, however, except for the indie channels and piratttradios, it didn’t have much of a distribution; now that the floodgates are wide open, it flows freely together with Good Content.
Back when human editors (good or bad) were mostly (not always, but oftentimes) filtering what’s to be shown (or heard on the radio) through limited media outlets, the media in general still had some human touch … and talent … and experience … and class … obviously, if it is a big investment, you do NOT want uneducated/inexperienced crowd running the expensive show. Now that there is basically no way it can ever go back, some people (yours truly included) would like to have at least SOME media outlets that are still human-filtered/edited by talented and experienced editors.
Hence, playlists … back to the MP3 revolution, they won by the direct/popular vote … people want to list what they want to hear/see … they skip what they don’t want … it remains to be seen if this is (playlisting) is The New Indirect Way of returning the talent the human touch and the class … nostalgic or not. Let’s wait and see (and I predict that some of those playlists will be made by retired editors of the 1980s … in roundabout way returning the “human touch”).
i havent been able to get into watching tv via streaming. enldess lists of shows ive never heard of with actors i dont know and when i do find something that looks interesting, it turns out to be drivel and to make matters worse ads pop up mid scene (classic tv worked around ads quite cleverly and they didnt ruin the show like they do now). im mostly watching 3 shows a year now and otherwise watching classic shows.
I agree with a lot of what you said and would like to add the bit my nostalgic friend and I came up with that the market is so flooded that nothing is special, has time to be savored, or become a cult classic (outside of meme culture). I remember getting excited about summer movies in the 70s and 80s and holiday specials that were special and not just 5 unaired hours of a supplement podcast. At this point, one only needs to look at the dizzying displays of the streaming sites. I guess the final nail in original and entertaining broadcast tv were reality shows and the 8 billion spinoffs along with the personal self as a BRAND. So it is all a big ass money grab for advertising dollars that if you do the math exist nowhere in the ad companies, ad hosts, nor the tech giants that sponsor them. I think everyone keeps moving fast, grabbing money and buying butt lifts before folks notice the hustle and no one can grab the ass implants back lol. Just the 80s on steroids in a lot of ways. Vapid materialism but on a much larger scale. It is kind of like now it is hard to find a town without a regentrified area with a riverwalk and food truck and bubble tea cafe… I guess my final old man yells at cloud bit would be that I cannot remember a good 90% of what I see now, both because of saturation and my brain knows if I miss something I can internet it and not have to wait until next seasons reruns on ota tv lol. I cannot tell you how many times we have watched the entire series of What We Do and it is almost like watching a new episode everytime. Sure some catch phrases stick but it is not like Ghostbusters where I could recite it line by line and shot by shot. Oh well I know every generation goes thru this since video killed the radio star and money for nothing and chicks for free. Ah that feels better.
Need a Parental Control Lock with a Key on a side of the box.
Needs at least one “channel” that is normally “scrambled”, except every so often it is unexpectedly available for some random amount of time (one week, one month), and then goes back to being scrambled.
The thrill of flipping through channels and hey! HBO is running a free week!