11
votes
Alright, ladies and gentlemen. Thinking caps needed. #Apple #movies #tv
I own a significant library of movies and tv shows. Somewhere near a 1000 combined tv/movies.
Is there an app out there that allows me to “EASILY” create a Pluto TV style streaming app for my elderly family and/or kids tv shows and movies, that plays like “live tv”.
All the items are purchased off of Apple Store, iTunes, Apple Movies and TV Shows. For reference.
https://ersatztv.org/ Is the answer if I understand your ask correctly. If you buy that machine that can produce tv channels you can also connect it to your server and have this go straight to their tv in a specific channel. Saw a YouTube video on it once.
Edit if you bought this media digitally then my solution does not work.
If you own a library I recommend Jellyfin. If you do not own said library but are just holding a non-transferrable, perpetual, cancellable license to view said titles on some DRM video platforms I don't think there is a durable solution.
EDIT: Oh, live TV. No idea. ffmpeg script to stream them off disk should be fairly trivial. If your server has the GPU it can transcode on the fly for compatibility.
What's your network topology here? Everyone on a VPN? VPN-bridged routers? Your own server with a public IP address?
Guys, Whitewatermoose's purchases are through Apple TV/iTunes. Think "digital rental on Apple's streaming platform with DRM and no known expiration time" rather than "digital file that can be copied and pasted". Hence, Plex, Jellyfin, and ersatztv are cool software but don't apply here.
Then the only answer is Apple TV, right?
The only existing solution I'm aware of is Apple TV, yes, but there's potentially a product worth building here that's an alternative frontend for browsing an Apple TV library. @moocow1452 also had a good suggestion with Movies Anywhere since it allows building custom playlists, but that only covers ~80% of a user's library from my experience and 0% of tv shows since MA is a movie service only.
I haven’t tried any, but I’ve been looking into ersatztv and TVguide for a similar purpose, maybe they can work for you.
Not sure about how you'd do it entirely within the Apple ecosystem. Maybe custom playlists or OBS screen sharing? Best bet may be to take what you can out of Movies Anywhere since Apple DRM is a pain about such things.
Not possible with the DRM'd files that you get from Apple. I've thought about the problem before and the only way I can think of is building an app that takes user-inputted information that deeplinks into the TV app. Maybe I'll build that next with Claude.
Kind of a bummer to read. Probably thousands of dollars spent on files that aren't easy to work with
Based on your constraints you seem to need Apple TV device and you need to login to it using an Apple account that has access to the library. Apple has family sharing so this doesn’t have to be your account. So you may need to create a new Apple account on the Apple TV if the viewer doesn’t already have an Apple device. I know some items can be shared for free but certain things like games need a separate paid family plan. I don’t think Apple checks if the family members are at the same location. But who knows if this will change in the future like happened with Netflix.
To get to the items you bought you can browse your library from the Apple TV. That’s a separate menu from their streaming service.
Yeah just get an Apple TV if you've purchased it legally from apple. Kinda interesting this question gets asked the day Apple announced their new Apple TV/HomeKit line up
Slightly off topic, but this reminds me of this comment in which @CrypticCuriosity629 describes in great detail a rather complex but awesome sounding IPTV setup to replicate TV channels from the 90s.
My on-topic response is, I think due to Apple's DRM very deliberately restricting unauthorized playback, you're not going to find any options here that don't involve figuring out some way to rip and remove DRM from everything you own into local storage (assuming such a thing is even possible).
You’re out of luck if your stuff is through iTunes. It’s all DRM encumbered, so you can’t just play the files in any player.
If you have DRM-free content, you can play that via the numerous other ways that people have mentioned. If you do ever find DRM-free content, you can easily play it back via Jellyfin or Plex. Both have Apple TV apps that can mimic live TV. Channels.Surf works pretty well with Plex and Zuno works with both Plex and Jellyfin.
For a given definition of easy, I’ve really liked using Coax with a Plex server. You’d need an Apple TV, but the plex server lets you have the library, and then in Coax you can create channels by tagging series or movies/videos to be in the pool of things the channel will show. It really mimics the experience of channel surfing with your own curated programming. I’ve been creating a curated set of stuff my kids can watch with it.