This is a python based cli-app using the python-plex-api to control a plex-client and act like a real TV channel with show scheduling, commercial breaks, movie nights, etc.

This project is inspired by the Fake TV blog post I came across on reddit a while ago. In his really cool project, the author uses a feature rich controller script called 'Python Plex Controller', located here: https://github.com/MoeFwacky/Python-Plex-Controller to handle his "Fake TV" channel. I spent a few hours playing with this script and really had fun with it. It pretty much does everything you need and a lot more. There was however one thing missing that turned out to be pretty important to me: some kind of episode / movie duration calculation to shift a daily generated TV schedule so no media gets cutoff. Basically with that script, you can set a repeatable "weekday" schedule for a TV show... So every weekday the next episode in say, the 'Seinfeld' series will play at the specified time (i.e. "6:30 PM"). The problem I was having with this script is that if an episode happens to be longer than usual (say 1 hour versus the usual 30 minutes as scheduled), it won't adjust for that but will cut it off if you have something scheduled at say, "7:00 PM". It's very possible that this feature exists in that script and I missed it, but after playing with the awesome Plex API library over at: https://github.com/pkkid/python-plexapi, I realized just how easy it is to control the playback of Plex media on my RasPlex client via my command line using Python and I decided to try and roll my own very simple script that does one thing really well: generate a daily TV schedule based on user defined TV Shows, time ranges, and random movies during specified movie time - injecting commercials where needed.

Features So Far:

Generate Daily Schedule of TV Show episodes based on user defined TV Shows.
Add a controller to query the local generated pseudo_tv.db to see when to trigger the next media.
Add episode duration checking & adjust daily generated schedule based on these results...
Generate daily html schedule (saved in ./schedules directory). Can be served via webserver.
Add "commercial injection" to fill up gaps between content.
Bug fixes
List of features from reddit.

If interested in this project, check back very soon when the beta is up. It's close and a tiny bit more user friendly. :)

How to Use (in the case someone stumbles across this and wants to try it before its polished):

The instructions below are all for configuring the "controller" device (i.e. a laptop or raspberry pi running linux). The "client" device should be a Raspberry Pi running Rasplex hooked up to your TV via HDMI - although I'm sure other devices work great too (never tried).

Download the Python Plex API & their dependencies. Also get yattag. All these dependencies can be installed via pip.
Download this repository & edit the pseudo_config.py / the pseudo_schedule.xml to your liking. Find your Plex token here
Run the PseudoChannel.py file with the following flags:

% python PseudoChannel.py -u -xml -g -r

The -u flag will prepare & update (& create if not exists) the local pseudo-channel.db. The -xml flag will update the newly created local db with your schedule from the xml file. The -g file will generate the daily schedule (for today). Finally, the -r file will run a while loop checking the time / triggering the playstate of any media that is scheduled. It will also update the daily schedule when the clock hits 11.59. The xml schedule is a bit tempermental at the moment so if you see errors, check your entries there first. Make sure all of your movie names / TV Series names are correct.

To run the app in a 'poor-mans-daemon-mode', run this:

% sudo screen -d -m python PseudoChannel.py -r

...the previous command will keep the clock / app running in the background via the screen utility - kinda like a daemon process.

Stay tuned for a polished version / bug fixes / features and commercial injection.