My Virtual Channel Showcase

[maddox]

My Virtual Channels are broken up into a few categories: Show specific channels, Movie channels, Holiday channels, Franchise channels.

I won't go through all of them, but I'll highlight a select few, and the rules that drive them.

What do your Virtual Channels look like?

Channel Highlights

Channel	Description
Seinfeld, Friends, etc	My show specific channels that run in order by season/episode.
Genre Based Movie Channels	Simple rule based channels that cycle movies based on their genres.
Decade Based Movies Channels	Simple rule based channels that cycle movies based on their release dates.
Holiday Channels	Halloween and Christmas based channels showing movies and specials.
Franchise Channels	Movie channels broken up by franchise. Marvel, Pixar, Star Wars, Harry Potter, etc.
Wrestling Channel	A channel that does nothing but play back to back 80s/90s WWF events.

My Channels

Highlighted Rules

I'll highlight a few of my channels and how their content is included.

When building out Virtual Channels with rules, you'll find you need to tweak them a bit based on the results. You can see below I have some really specific rules. Sometimes holiday movies will sneak into your channel based on your rules, so it's nice to be able to exclude things with the rules.

Channel	Notes	Rules
Seinfeld	Just back to back episodes.	I added my Seinfeld show and that's it.
Holiday Kids	Holiday specials and movies for the kids.	Labels: Holiday, Library Visibility: Not Library
Holiday Classics	Holiday specials and movies for the adults.	Labels: Holiday, Library Visibility: IS Library
WWF Channel	Back to back 80s/90s WWF events. I have my vidoes in a single WWF collection that is hidden. The videos are hidden as well. This allows me to not clutter my library with WWF videos I'd never watch, while being able to have a nice long running channels of nostalgia I can drop in to.	Collection: WWF
Thrillers	Movie channel.	Categories: Movie, Genres: Thriller, Mystery, Genres: NOT Comedy Visibility: NOT kids
80s Comedy	Movie channel for 80s comedies.	Categories: Movie, Genres: Comedy, Year: >= 1980, Year: <= 1989, Genres: NOT Holiday Visibility: NOT kids
90s Throwback	Movie channel for 90s.	Categories: Movie, Genres: Comedy, Year: >= 1990, Year: <= 1999, Labels: NOT wrestling, NOT pixar-short, NOT holiday Visibility: NOT kids

What do your Virtual Channels look like? Show us! It's nice to get some new ideas.

[jasonmcroy]

I'd love to see everyone's ideas. I haven't played around with this feature yet. I am thinking about a Seinfeld channel and something like Bob's Burgers and/or The Simpsons. Oh, now that I think about it maybe I can do a "Cartoon" Channel with a mix.

[Absenm]

I have an Animated Sitcoms channel. I mean shows like Family Guy, American Dad, Futurama, Simpsons, Bob's Burgers, South Park. At first I was going to call it Adult Cartoons, but that raised too many eyebrows. lol.

I also have a True Crime channel. Shows like Court Cam, City Confidential, Forensic Files.

And a Fictional Crime channel. Shows like CSI, Barney Miller, Grace Point, Monk, NCIS

I haven't yet done any specific rules, but will look into that for a Classic Sitcoms channel next.

[maddox]

Awesome.

I think @Fofer does something cool with JUST pilots of TV shows.

[Fofer]

Yeah, I'm really enjoying playing around with Virtual Channels, it's a great feature that leverages everything great about Channels DVR. I'm working on a Virtual Channel that only airs classic TV commercials, for a kick of nostalgia to play in the background. I'm still on the hunt for good logo artwork for that one...

Here's a list of my other Virtual Channels so far.

I'm not a huge Austin Powers fan or anything, I just set that one up as a quick example when demonstrating Channels DVR to a friend

[mjitkop]

A music videos channel with your full control over the video selection. Now you got me thinking!

[Absenm]

Yeah I have a music video channel too. I was once going to suggest as a feature request an alternate information bar that was like the old style 1980s MTV lower left corner superimpose. Figured that would be too much of an edge case.

[miwa]

Because I tolerate an annoying Xfinity 1.2TB download quota in the name of a cheap bill, I've created virtual channels to play select stuff I've DVR'ed from Pluto and/or OTA

I have virtual channels for:
each kid and their re-watch movies because .. well, they're that age that they just nonstop re-watch
general kids channel filled with random kids stuff I've collected
comedies -- all stuff tagged comedy
action -- all stuff tagged action
curiosities -- this is my category for things that feel like what discovery used to play that I manage to dvr. stuff like food factory, nova, modern marvels, cosmic vistas, etc.
nature -- my catalog of planet earth digitized and other nature shows I've been able to collect on Pluto
background -- my collection of stingray naturescapes that I've collected.

I dont necessarily create the channels with rules, but here's where the flexibility of channels dvr programming has been genius. I just click add content and click away on the library. entire season passes of stuff get added. OR, if you tweak the dvr pass to "limit X recordings" and keep unwatched episodes only, it keeps the virtual channel fresh too.

[j_anderson]

How do you get Channels to see your music videos? What naming convention are you using for the individual files?

I have a folder where I have music videos stored but Channels doesn't see them when I point the server to the folder. My music videos are all in .mp4 but I suspect my naming isn't what the server is looking for. its Band name - Song title.mp4

Do you have them tagged a certain way in metadata?

[maddox]

You should be importing them under Videos and not TV Shows. That's for starters. And you need to group them appropriately into a folder. Videos are imported into Video Groups:

/storage/videos/music_videos
/storage/videos/music_videos/thriller.mp4
/storage/videos/music_videos/smells like teen spirit.mp4

Once they're imported, you can edit their metadata. One of the pieces of data is Category. You can set them to the Music Video category. You can batch edit them by selecting them and using the actions menu to edit the metadata for all selections.

Once you do this, you can create a rule for a virtual channel to include all videos that are of the category Music Video.

[j_anderson]

Thanks. I have tried that but the server still isn't seeing any files in the folder.

See Screenshot

[maddox]

1. it won't show files there
2. you need to import /Volumes/Main Movie/Videos

You set your import to the root, and it pulls in all the video groups. You don't import a single video group.