Configuring TVS

Now that you’ve got TVS running, it’s time to make it your own! Everything in TVS can be set up in a YAML-based config file named 📄 config.tvs.yml, located in the root of your installation directory. This file tells TVS what channels to show, where to find your media, and how everything should look.

Conceptual overview

Television Simulator simulates the following components of a traditional television experience:

• TV Screen: we simulate a television screen with configurable aspect ratios and screen effects, such as CRT scanlines, picture noise, picture blur and shadow masks. Standard definition, high definition and custom resolutions can be set. The screen will automatically resize to fill available space in your browser window and works in full screen as well. All of these effects can be disabled or customized, and depending on the hardware you’re running TVS on you may want to disable some effects for better performance.

• Tuner and Receiver: the look and feel of the on-screen displays can be skinned to look like a typical built-in TV tuner and a few different models of set top boxes. Colors can be customized and program information can be shown on-screen (if available). Volume controls and muting indicators get their own set of on-screen controls as well. You can mix and match tuner and receiver themes.

• Headend: In the cable TV business, a headend is a facility where channels are received from different sources and combined into the channel lineup that’s transmitted to you. Television Simulator lets you define your own channels by number and to decide what content to put on each channel. Most of your configuration file will likely consist of channels and content.

What’s a YML file?

The TVS configuration file is written in the YAML language. It’s not a programming language but rather a way to represent data in a human-readable format. YAML is often used for configuration files because it’s easy to read and write. To make it even easier to read and write, you can use a program like Visual Studio Code (known as VS Code) to edit your config file. VS Code can highlight your YAML syntax and help you avoid mistakes.

Configuring Visual Studio Code

To configure VS Code for editing YAML files, you can install the YAML extension from the Visual Studio Code Marketplace. This extension provides features like syntax highlighting, autocompletion, and validation for YAML files, making it easier to work with your TVS configuration.

Caution

The YAML extension has a known bug in version 1.18 that can lead to incorrectly saying that your config file is invalid. This should be fixed in version 1.19, but until then install version 1.17 of the extension.

Automatic validation

In Visual Studio Code you can validate your config file with the YAML extension installed by making sure that it begins with the following text which points VS Code to the TVS schema file:

# yaml-language-server: $schema=https://gcpw.art/tvs/schemas/5.1.0.json

As TVS evolves, the schema version may change. All previous schemas will remain available for backward compatibility.

Reading the example config

Television Simulator ships with an example configuration file (📄 config.tvs.yml) that showcases different features. More example configurations are available in the 📁 config-examples directory, and can be previewed by navigating to 🌎 /examples in TVS itself.

Tip

It’s a good idea to back up the example config file, as ultimately you’ll be editing or replacing it with your custom configuration.

Channels and content tutorial

Minimum example

At a minimum, your configuration file must have at least one channel defined. Channels must have unique channel numbers. To learn more, backup your 📄 config.tvs.yml file and replace it with the following contents:

# yaml-language-server: $schema=https://gcpw.art/tvs/schemas/5.1.0.json

channels:

- number: 1

This configuration has a single channel, channel 1. It has no content so when you start TVS up with this config you’ll see nothing but static. The - number: 1 line begins defining the channel. Each channel will start with a line like this after the channels: block which starts the list.

We can make this a bit more interesting by adding some content to the channel. Channels can only have one top-level content item, but this isn’t as limiting as it sounds (we’ll get into that later). Add some content like this:

# yaml-language-server: $schema=https://gcpw.art/tvs/schemas/5.1.0.json

channels:

- number: 1
  color: blue

Caution

Note the indentation! YAML requires consistent indentation to work correctly. Here we’re using two spaces for indentation.

All lines that are indented under the - number: 1 line are part of the channel’s definition. Here we’ve added the color content engine, which simply displays a solid background color.

Defaults

As you can see in the screenshot, we’re using a standard-definition picture with the default tuner and receiver themes which provide an old-school look. A bit of picture noise, scanlines and blur are also enabled by default. Say you’d prefer a more modern appearance, you can change the defaults in your configuration file (to change the defaults for everyone) or by using keyboard shortcuts (to change how it looks for your browser only). You may want to do this to find out how you’d prefer things to look, then set the defaults in your configuration file.

Picture controls

Let’s try changing the way the simulated TV screen looks. With TVS running, press the keyboard shortcut Alt + 2 Alt2 Alt + 2 Alt2 to turn off picture noise. You’ll see a message in the bottom of the screen showing that the picture changed:

Similarly, if you use Alt + 1 Alt1 Alt + 1 Alt1 you’ll see the scanlines effect turn on and off. Alt commands from 1 through 7 are currently implemented and will change picture settings, so try them out to find out how they work!

In the Keyboard Shortcuts section you can find a full list of keyboard shortcuts and what they do.

Resetting the picture

You can screw up the picture settings quite a bit, but don’t worry! You can always reset to the defaults (as defined in the config file) by pressing Alt + R AltR Alt + R AltR . This will reset all picture settings and reload the page.

Graphical Setup

Instead of using keyboard shortcuts you can also use the graphical setup interface. Press F4 F4 F4 F4 to open the setup menu or go to 🌎 /setup (example). These settings are only changed for your browser, not for any other users.