Retro Cable TV
A retro cable box that plays 2002 to 2006 American television on a CRT, fed by a pipeline that turns archived TV into a searchable, scheduled library.
Turning a pile of tapes into a channel
The box runs FieldStation42 on a Raspberry Pi driving a composite CRT. The hard part is the library, so I built two tools for it.
BroadcastBrain takes Internet Archive downloads, VHS captures, DVR recordings and DVD rips, and turns them into a segmented, analyzed, deduplicated library ready to schedule as cable. You drop videos in a folder, run one command, and wake up to a processed library. You can search it in plain English, like "all MTV clips from 2004", and every AI step is optional: the pipeline still runs without it and fills the gaps later.
RetroConvert batch-converts video to 640x480 for the CRT. It never upscales, verifies each file before deleting the source, and picks up where it left off.