Personal TV Station

From Fusselman.org

While I haven't strictly built this, yet, it's something that's clogging up my mind, and I just need to get it down someplace.

While watching HBO tonight, it seemed to me that they knew exactly what I wanted to see, and were showing me things that I wanted to watch: 300, Jumper and The Matrix. As part of my Home Automation initiatives, I have content presented to TVs via a centralized RF Modulator. I wonder what it would take to present a constant stream of movies and TV run on a central server of some sort, from my library of DVD'd movies and TV. I already enjoy the "instant access" watching TV and movies via PC, but I have a hard time remembering to start one, or, if I do, choosing something. There's something unique about the "wonder what's next" aspect of Television and Radio.

I could (and probably should) simply queue up all the files I want in Winamp (or similar) and set it to "Shuffle", but that's a bit simplistic for what I really want. Ideally, I'd be able to control content by type (TV vs Movies), and genre both by day of week and time of day. For example, on Friday Evenings, show "Kevin's TV" in the late afternoon and switch to "Kevin's Movies" later in the evening. At a time where Becky would be home as well, switch to "Movies we both like", and then turn off for the night.

It seems to me (as a PERL dork) that the solution is a series of SQL tables with information about content and categories (Along with the specifics on how and when to play them) which is then read by a PERL script, which, within the parameters of the user's requests, schedules and plays content. The content would then be RF Modulated, or delivered directly via VGA to a TV. The content could also, potentially, be ICECast or similar to be played on laptops or PCs throughout the house, even wirelessly.

Anyhow, this is nothing but a pipedream, at the moment. Just seems interesting.