FieldStation42 - OTA TV Simulator

New Feature: Sub-Folders as content hints

Subfolders, when specially named, can be used to restrict content to certain times.

Monthly based scheduling hints

Sub-folders with the name of a month will only be played in slots falling in that month. The names need to be fully spelled out (October, not Oct).

Quarterly scheduling hints

Sub-folders with the name of a quarter will only be played during that quarter of the year. Q1 is the first 3 months, Q2 is the second 3 months and so on. Valid quarter names are Q1, Q2, Q3 and Q4.

Date range scheduling hints

Content in sub-folders with a date range and works across year boundary. Some examples include:

• Sub-folder with name December 1 - December 25 would only be played between the first day of December through the 25th day of December.
• Sub-folder with name November 15 - April 10 would only be played between November 15 through April 19th.

Multiple improvements and fixes are live now, including:

• Extended support for multiple video formats mp4, mpg, mpeg, avi, mov, mkv
• Improvements to fill content for commercials and bumps - allowing for the scheduler to try and get as close as possible to the target duration without hard failing when it can't get close enough.
• Fixed an issue with how subdirectories were being read

Several updates to improvements and overall QOL features for users:

• Added sub-folder support for content folders - this enables a lot of use cases for reusing content.
• Major code reorganization to clean up the top level of the repository
• Added install script to handle python virtual environment setup and simplify the overall process.
• Added all new documentation on setup and install process: https://github.com/shane-mason/FieldStation42/wiki
• If station runtime directories don't exist, the scheduler will attempt to create

Added JSON formatted station configurations to replace the python module versions - though both can be used currently.

Several updates are now available in the github repo, including:

• Added `--rebuild_catalog` switch to force rebuilding all catalogs before generating schedules - this is useful when the content has been updated. To only rebuild a specific catalog, just delete that station's catalog.bin file.
• Added installation and setup documentation to the README

Added two new configuration options for specifying a signoff video to the per-station configurations:

#used at sign-off time (played once)
'sign_off_video': "catalog/anthem_signoff.mp4",
#used when the channel is offair 
'off_air_video': "catalog/off_air_pattern.mp4",

and then an option in the schedule configuration to note when to run it - the following will cause sign-off at 3am:

3: {'event' : 'signoff'} 

About Sign Off events

A signoff event is specified by assigning a time slot to {'event' : 'signoff'} and will cause the video file specified by sign_off_video to be played once at the top of the hour. If off_air_video is specified, then the remainder of the hour will be filled by looping off_air_video.

About Off Air time
If a time slot is not specified, it will be considered as off-air for schedule creation. If off_air_video is specified, then the slot will be filled by looping off_air_video.