Raspberry Pi (online)

This article may be outdated

This script turns a Linux rig into a JW Broadcasting "TV channel". This is not for your Plex server. Rather this is used instead of Plex.

• Videos are played randomly in a loop
• Resumes playback when restarting
• New videos get downloaded regularly (jwb-index)
• Old videos get deleted when disk space is low (jwb-index)

The guide is written for a Raspberry Pi, but naturally this can be used on any Linux box.

Preparation

Install your distro of choice to a SD-card. A lite version of Raspbian is a good choice :)

You can login and configure the Pi from another computer, over SSH. To enable this, simply put an empty file on the Pi's SD-card, called

/boot/ssh

Boot the Pi. Now you can log in over SSH (example), or locally if you connect a keyboard and display to the Pi.

ssh pi@raspberrypi

The default user is pi and password is raspberrypi

External storage (optional)

It could be a good idea to store the videos on an external drive, or a thumb drive. SD-cards have a tendency to break, after a year or so of heavy use in a Pi.

Plug in a USB drive, and run lsblk to get its device name.

lsblk

NAME   MAJ:MIN RM   SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINT
sda      8:0    0   16G    0 disk 
├─sda1   8:1    0   16G    0 part

In this case the device is called /dev/sda1. Now edit /etc/fstab and add the following line:

/dev/sda1  /home/pi/jwb  vfat  defaults  0  2

Create the mount point, and mount the USB drive.

mkdir /home/pi/jwb
sudo mount /home/pi/jwb

Installation

Install the required software

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install omxplayer git python3 python3-setuptools curl

Download and install the JW scripts

git clone https://github.com/allejok96/jw-scripts.git
cd jw-scripts
sudo python3 setup.py install

Now you can start to fill up the collection of videos:

jwb-index --since 2017-01-01 --free 100 --download --limit-rate 0 /home/pi/jwb

Playback service

Create the service file for video playback.

If you're not using a Pi, you have to specify a media player at the end of the jwb-offline command.

/etc/systemd/system/jwb-offline.service

[Unit]
Description=Play JW videos

[Service]
ExecStart=/usr/local/bin/jwb-offline /home/pi/jwb
User=pi

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

Enable and start it.

sudo systemctl enable jwb-offline
sudo systemctl start jwb-offline

Download service

If your Pi won't be having an internet connection, go to jwb-offline-import.

Create a service file and a timer. Tweak the options as you like (see jwb-index).

/etc/systemd/system/jwb-index.service

[Unit]
Description=Download the latest JW videos

[Service]
ExecStart=/usr/local/bin/jwb-index --latest --download --free 100 --no-warning /home/pi/jwb
User=pi

/etc/systemd/system/jwb-index.timer

[Timer]
OnCalendar=daily
Persistent=yes

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

Enable the timer.

sudo systemctl enable jwb-index.timer

Now you should have your own "JW Broadcasting TV station".