TV Server

Introduction

TV Server

• provides ad free viewing of videos published on the public internet.
• connects Youtube to your TV and lets you control them with your mobile phone.
• is a thin wrapper around FFmpeg, yt-dlp and Transmission

Architecturally, it consists of 3 components:

• The remote control, which is a web app that acts as a remote control
• The player, which is a web app that runs on the TV
• The server, which is a daemon that hosts the player and remote control apps and handles downloading and streaming movies;

It has been tested on macOS and Debian Bullseye.

Setup

The easiest way to get started is with docker compose.

First you must create a file called .env in the root of the source directory that will contain values for the required environment variables. There is a sample .env file called env.sample that contains suitable values for running docker compose on macOS, except for the GOOGLE_KEY, which you must supply yourself (see below).

$ cp env.sample .env
$ echo GOOGLE_KEY=YOUR_GOOGLE_KEY >> .env
$ export UID
$ docker compose up

NB YouTube search will not work until a key for the Google API is provided through the GOOGLE_KEY environment variable - (see below).

Configuration

The tvserver daemon is configured through the following environment variables

Environment Variable	Description
GOOGLE_KEY	*A key to use with the Google API, see below for instructions for obtaining a key.
MOVIE_DIR	*The directory where movies will be stored.
CLIENT_DIR	The directory contain the client apps, defaults to clients
TRANSMISSION_URL	URL to access the Transmission HTTP interface
TRANSMISSION_USER	Username to access the Transmission HTTP interface
TRANSMISSION_PWD	Password to access the Transmission HTTP interface
TORRENT_DIR	The directory where torrent files are saved.

* Required

Obtaining a Google API Key

A Google account is required to create an API Key. Instructions for obtaining the key are described here: https://support.google.com/googleapi/answer/6158862?hl=en

Usage

Once the TV server daemon is up and running, load the Player page onto your TV with your TV browser by navigating to following page http://hostname/player, where hostname is the name of the computer running the TV server daemon.

Then, from your mobile phone's browser, navigate to http://hostname to load the remote control app.

Clients

For simplicity, compiled versions of the apps are available in the clients directory.

The source for the clients is available as submodules that can be downloaded using the following commands:

$ git submodule init
$ git submodule update

Any changes made to the clients can be compiled and copied to the clients directory by executing the following in client source directory:

client_src/tvremote $ yarn run export

VLC Player

VLC has support for a very broad range of video and audio codecs. As a fallback, VLC can be used to play videos to a monitor to the server.

Remote Control

The remote control is a web app that runs in the browser of a mobile phone and provides the following functionality:

List of available videos

Videos are organised into collections (folders).

Clicking on a video brings up a menu of available options

For instance the option to rename or move a video

Or to create a new video by applying one of a list of available transformations

The user is invited to confirm the conversion

New Videos can be found by searching and downloading them from YouTube

Clicking brings up a dialog asking to confirm before downloading.

The final tab provides a list of running tasks, e.g. downloads and conversions in progress.