I’ve become infatuated with Raspberry Pi single-board computers recently, and thanks to a low-grade eBay addiction, I now have several of them just sitting around, mocking me to make them useful. Recently, I read about someone who turned one into a sort of personal cable channel, and I got fired up on the idea of creating my own “cable channel” of highly curated videos—which I’m sure nobody else would want to watch.
It probably would have been easier to just follow the tutorial I found online for this type of project, but as usual, I felt it necessary to reinvent the wheel for the sake of “learning.” For me, the basic parts of getting a home cable channel working are:
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Figure out how to randomize/play/loop videos from a folder
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Determine how to “broadcast” the content (HDMI, Wi-Fi, etc.)
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Decide what content to use
I kept the first part simple. Since I’d be running this project on a spare Raspberry Pi 4 with Pi OS, I decided to use VLC as the media player. VLC natively does everything I needed (randomize, play, loop from a folder), and it can be controlled via terminal/bash scripts—perfect for making everything restart automatically if the system reboots.
I skipped the broadcasting question for now and focused on getting the system running. The fun part, after all, was deciding on a theme for my channel and grabbing videos! I’ve always been a movie buff and grew up watching late-night “midnight movie” flicks on TV, so it was a no-brainer to load up the Pi with movies and shows that fit that vibe.
I could have taken the easy route and gone straight to the Internet Archive, but instead, I pulled material from YouTube. A little-known fact: YouTube not only streams video content but also allows you to download files. Since I’d need a large number of videos, I wrote a quick Python script to batch-download user-curated playlists. Python makes this easy with the pytube library, which was designed for this purpose. The script asks for a YouTube URL and a save location, then pulls down the highest-quality stream available.
At first, I ran into certificate errors on macOS. Instead of troubleshooting libraries, I just ran the script on an Ubuntu machine and it worked without issues.
The flow is straightforward:
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Prompt for the YouTube URL and the save folder
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Use pytube to get the highest-resolution stream
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Download it to the folder
It’s a short and simple tool, but it does the job—a quick way to grab videos for offline viewing. After downloading a bunch of nostalgic movies and TV shows, I started scraping vintage 1970s commercials too. Since VLC randomizes playback, there’s a chance that after a movie or show, one or two commercials will play before the next feature. After raiding YouTube’s vaults, I had a solid library for my channel. Then came the fun part: testing and tweaking.
Long story short—it worked! It feels like watching a real TV channel from the 1970s. Videos flowed seamlessly from one to the next, with a nice balance of movies, shows, and commercials. (I might add more commercials later—it’s surprisingly fun to see a 1972 McDonald’s ad pop up.)
My startup bash script launches VLC at boot, runs everything in fullscreen, randomizes playback, and loops continuously without showing the user interface:
Right now, I have the Pi hooked up to a spare TV via HDMI, but I’m tempted to pick up an HDMI-to-RF modulator so I can run the channel on a CRT I keep around for playing Nintendo. Ideally, I’d love to broadcast to multiple TVs around the house—but I don’t know if I want to run 100 feet of coax cable just to watch Leonard Nimoy’s In Search Of in every room.
Or do I?
