dizquetv VS exhibitor

In my experience, modern entertainment takes too much cognitive load to get up and running. With streaming/on demand, I have to make pointed decisions on what show I'm watching. I don't always want to make a decision right now of what to watch, I just want to watch something that's good enough or fits a certain theme. TV Channel creation programs, like DizqueTV[0] or ErsatzTV[1] have taken the load off, or at least lets me do that cognitive work in advance when making the channels.

You still need some way to get input to swap between these digital channels (I use Plex to surface my shows and schedule), but if you have existing local content it really feels like the "old" way of doing TV. You can even add commercials between episodes if you wanted!

I'm not sure if I'd call this foolproof for a 94-year-old, especially since sometimes the software needs to restart, but it's a step above modern streaming IMO.

[0] https://github.com/vexorian/dizquetv

Check out https://github.com/vexorian/dizquetv

For those interested in doing something similar there's a Plex add-on for making custom TV channels:

https://github.com/vexorian/dizquetv

Personally I want almost this. I want to rotate the TV shows my kids watch in the morning but I don't want to start part way through a show (the one part of the old analogue experience that I don't miss at all). Difficult to square that circle.

My idea is for each screen plugged in to its own Raspberry Pi 4 Model B 4GB running at the CLI. The Pi would have its own instance of dizqueTV and its stream viewed through some type of custom program running SMPlayer that is also on the PI and outputting the to hdmi port. DizqueTV would have FFMPEG disabled and the content directly accessed per this guide: https://github.com/vexorian/dizquetv/wiki/Raspberry-guide

I have a potato (J4105) Plex server and tried DizqueTV, ErsatzTV and Jason's DizqueTV fork very recently. But I couldn't get it stable unfortunately. When one series would work great, another one wouldn't, or even refused to play. Or certain program boundaries made the player crash from time to time. And watermark overlays were another story of it's own.

TL;DR: A React front-end component workshop, a simple version of Storybook.

So around 5 months ago, I needed a tool to preview front-end (React) components whilst I create them for a personal project of mine. There were two options: Storybook or Ladle.

Storybook is the tool everybody knows. I've used it before quite a lot. It's very big, full-fat, supports loads of use-cases, etc.

Ladle comes out of Uber. It's very small, lean, and doesn't support that much. After trying it out for a while, it just gives me a feeling like it's a 20% project to learn some new tech.

So I realised that I wanted something kind of in the middle. Something that's a bit more customizable than Ladle, but something much simpler and less intrusive than Storybook.

This led me to create Exhibitor (https://github.com/samhuk/exhibitor) (https://demo.exhibitor.dev).

I worked on it on-and-off for a couple months, and it ended up being something that I'm quite proud of. It's not perfect, and supports only a fraction of what Storybook does, however for a tool made by 1 engineer vs the 20+ for Storybook, I'm quite happy about it!

Exhibitor, a snappy & delightful React component workshop, is GA. My aim is for Exhibitor to be an extremely fast, easy to use, and delightful tool for creating front-end component libraries.

It's been around 2 months since my last mention and quite a tonne has changed.

Wiki: https://github.com/samhuk/exhibitor/wiki

Looks interesting. Coincidentally, I've just completed the bulk of work on a distributed Websocket network system to synchronize certain bits of state between multiple clients for my own kind of Storybook tool [0]. How interesting!

This kind of tool is exactly what I would have needed, instead of the approach I've taken which is a bit kludgy, grass-roots, novice-like, etc.

Good work :)

[0] https://github.com/samhuk/exhibitor/pull/22

I was a bit deflated when my submission about https://github.com/samhuk/exhibitor fell through the HN floor-boards.

Think Storybook but simpler, faster, better Typescript support, and uses esbuild by default.

...Is the aim. I'm the sole lead dev working on it at the moment up against the ~10-20 strong team who built most of Storybook, so it's a long road ahead, but it's growing into something I'm quite proud of and happy about.