Can I use my own media for virtual channels?

I've seen other posts with their own custom servers that allow for streaming custom media either in Plex or in Channels.

But I'm wondering if there is a way to simply drag and drop my own media into Channels DVR's TV/Movies folders within the Recordings folder. I would love to use this to create virtual channels with the media I already have.

Any suggestions appreciated!

Yea you can drag the files into the Imports/TV or Imports/Movies folders

Oops I meant to add - when I tried to do this, the virtual channel did not seem to pick it up, and is not playing any of the files I added. Any idea?

Maybe check under DVR > Manage > Unmatched

I've done just this.

I actually created a separate folder in my Plex TV Shows library (so that collection in Plex points to multiple folders), and moved media over to that folder for the shows that I want Channels to import and know about. Then added the folder to the Local Content place in the DVR Settings, and refreshed.

Some gotchas are in the indexing. Channels relies on the subdirectory being the name of the series, so you can't just point it at a mass of video files, or even directly to a folder with Season_XX subfolders. It also doesn't appear to deal well with underscores in lieu of spaces in the show name, so "Night_Court" wasn't detect properly, and ended up in the unmatched place tmm1 pointed you to.

Once that happened, I setup a collection and added the TV shows I wanted for the virtual channel into the collection. You can also use a smart rule there, rather than manually adding content. I then added that collection to the virtual channel. This way I can just add more content to that collection when I want to. You can wait for it to reindex, or you can force it to refresh the guide data for your virtual channel, and your new content should start.

Read up on how Local Content works in Channels. Once you have your own content in your Channels library, you can use it just like anything else. Channels doesn't differentiate. Use anything in your library to build Virtual Channels.

hmm I don't see anything when I go to DVR > Manage. There are 2 tabs: TV and Movies. Both have no content listed.

In my TV folder there is a folder called "Friends" and there are a few episodes inside.

Where does the "Manage" option show up?

Please report the path that you dragged items into.

Apologies, I realized that I needed to add my local content, as one of these comments suggests! I did that, and now it works.

Thanks guys

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Different question though - this might sound weird but is there a way to have episodes start at whatever point they would be in the timeline? The only option I see is "watch from beginning". Would be kinda cool to have it work exactly like it would on live tv.

That's a bug in the iOS app only and was resolved with version 5.1.0.

Our releases follow a phased pattern across 7 days. You can get it by manually updating via the App Store.

sounds good, thank u!