It's hard to contextualize what MTV was in a way that'll make sense to someone that didn't grow up with it being relevant. MTV always sucked, at least for as long as I've been old enough to care about it. But it sucked in a way that was different than how it sucks now. When I think of MTV sucking, I think of the shift to Reality TV, which isn't even what they're known for anymore. The Real World basically invented modern reality TV in 1990, and Real World/Road Rules marathons were commonplace by the year 2000, and I won't even get into how their sister channel VH1 slid into the wackiest Reality TV concepts imaginable. Spring Break would see college kids get fucking smashed out of their faces on booze live on TV once a year. They'd spend Summer parked on a beach in Key West, FL and have the members of 2Gether go on Say What? Karaoke. When I was in high school they came up with The Osbornes. I cannot explain why, especially after getting my hands on a copy and attempting to re-watch it but The World Turned With The Osbornes. In reality, it's just alot of Sharon Osborne being an entitled jerk to everyone around her, which is now what she's sorta known for. But there was still a focus on music, TRL was where people voted for music videos, was one of the most important things to a preteen who cared about music. Videos would rise to the top or fall off the list as their popularity ebbed and flowed. Videos would get retired & smashed with baseball bats so that they couldn't be voted for anymore to allow new videos to enter the rotation. In the pre-Youtube days, MTV & VH1 were the only way to see music videos at all. If you wanted 24/7 music videos MTV2 was an option if your parents had it in their cable package.
Of course, because MTV and, in my area Z100, operated in the method they do, they not only stuck to the Top 40, but reinforced what the Top 40 was. Because if this, if you wanted to be famous at all, you needed not only to have a music video, but you were encouraged to make something that stood out. And to some degree this worked - if you were Pearl Jam dropping the video for Jeremy on the unsuspecting public, you got noticed. If you know me, you'll know that my tastes run mostly in the rock and roll side of music, and especially now I really appreciate weird shit. Much of the Billboard Top 40 was not to my tastes, even at the time. MTV2 had alot more music on offer, some of it great, some of it not so great, but if you were paying attention you'd notice up and comers there first, things like Bodies by Drowning Pool, Get Free by The Vines, or Fell in Love with A Girl by The White Stripes.
Anyway, let's rewind to last summer. I spent a week at the Jersey Shore, and one evening me and my husband got stoned and watched The Matrix, and afterwards we put on one of those Vevo music video stations on Hulu. Since I had already gotten some DIY TV channels up and running at home, we spitballed the idea of creating our own. At the time, ErsatzTV didn't seem to have proper Music Video support so we stuck a pin in the idea.
The past few weeks have been crazy. In addition to the very public dismantling of the united states government, I've been trying to hash out the new kitchen design with the construction company I hired, and in the meantime the floor in the kitchen seems to be getting worse. Zac's grandfather's health also took a turn for the worse and he passed away last week. In an attempt to get our minds off stuff, we've revived the project, especially now that ErsatzTV has better support for Music Videos.
It's not *actually* that hard to set this stuff up. ErsatzTV is the software I'm using to generate the IPTV-compatible channels on my local network. I pointed a library at my Music Videos, structured it so that it's like /data/MusicVideos/Artist/Song/Video.mp4, built a smart collection on the search term *, assigned that collection to a schedule, assigned the schedule to a channel playout, and fed it back into both Plex and Jellyfin's Live TV.
Really the bulk of the work has been sourcing the videos, which means gathering up as many music videos as I can think of and running them through yt-dlp, then sorting them. Me and Zac went to bed the other night, and spent an hour rattling off musicians that we wanted to look for berfore we fell asleep. We also had to have some Conversations about people who suck. We're allowing The Smashing Pumpkins despite Billy Corgan being a shithead, but we decided that we will only allow one Kanye West song and it's because we're getting the Zach Galifianakis Dancing on A Farm version of Can't Tell Me Nothing.
To sort and tag everything, I created two python scripts, one regexes out of the filename the Artist and Song, but it only really works if the format is Artist - Song [youtube_id].mp4, so some of them have to get cleaned up. Lots of videos say "official music video" or "official video" or some variation of that, or have quotes, or in some cases just aren't consistent from song to song (I'm looking at you, Ted Leo & the Pharmacists). The regex I wrote for my first crack at this didn't include hypens, so stuff like Heart-Shaped Box got tagged "Heart"
The second script creates Kodi compatible NFO XML files, so that ErsatzTV can show the Artist and Song at the start of each video. It basically relies on the first script doing it's job correctly, as it just takes the Folder Names and applies them as Artist and Song Title. My first attempt at this was to figure out each file's duration and create .SRT files showing the info, but ErsatzTV didn't display them, no matter how I configured it. There's proper support in here for displaying song information using a sbntxt template file that I can't seem to make heads or tails of. I changed one number in a big comma-delimited string from 4 to 0 and it moved the information to the bottom-left from the center-left, but I have no idea what that number represented or how I'm supposed to know it.
Oh and as a bit I slapped the Buzzworthy logo on as a watermark.
