I love having an entire live TV channel dedicated to re-runs of old Star Trek episodes
Ok so, I have a little Kodi setup which includes a live tv system hooked up to Pluto so I can grab a bunch of channels for free. Turns out, this includes not one, but two whole channels of just Star Trek!
The first one is mostly TNG and the original series, and the other one (“creatively” called More Star Trek) has mainly Voyager and Deep Space Nine. I like these because I don’t even have to think about what episode to watch, and can just enjoy some Star Trek!
The only downside to this is well, ads lol
I find the PlutoTV app to also be much more user-friendly and reliable than Paramount Plus. I would rather be able to have everything on demand and pay Paramount, but the Paramount Plus app is so buggy on my Smart TV and on Kodi that I’ve given up.
The last straw was when I was actually contemplating writing a script to automatically restart Kodi because of how often Paramount Plus dies on Kodi.
I agree with you that it’s nice in a way not even having to think about what to watch next. If something really bad comes on, like that pretty racist TNG episode from season 1 or the Voyage lizard episode, it’s a lot easier to just switch from the Star Trek to the More Trek channel, or vice versa, and be done with it.
I have an offline raspberry pi hooked up to my tv that just plays Futurama. There is no controller, no ability to switch episodes, it just continues playing randomly. If you turn on the TV it will just be in the middle of a random futurama episode.
I’ve finally ripped all my original Trek DVD/Blu-Rays and am going to make a second one for Trek.
The only choice I’ll have to make then is input 1 for Futurama or input 2 for Trek!
Cool! Can you share how you set this up? I would love to make something like this.
It’s pretty great. Our TV came with Pluto and there have been a handful of times where I’ll throw on the trek channel because my wife and I can’t figure out what to watch.
I used to have channel that would only run Sci-fi shows on repeat without any breaks or ads.
Few of the shows that ran on it: ST:TNG, ST:DS9, ST:ENT, ST:VOY, ST:DIS, Stargate: SG1, Stargate:Atlantis, Stargate: Universe, Dark Matter, Expanse,
And they would go in cricles, like one episode of each show. Sometimes they would do a marathon and just play the entire show in few days. NON-STOP, NO-ADS Sci fi goodness. Best TV channel i ever had.
Never heard of Dark Matter. Thanks for the recommendation!
Here is another one I like but was not showing on that tv channel: Killjoys
Cool! I will check it out.
Check out dizqueTV. You can make as many Star Trek channels as you want. I have one for each series, and 2 that run a playlist of my favorite episodes ever.
I use DisqueTV on my Plex Server to do this.
As long as the ads aren’t too crazy (I haven’t really watched much on Pluto). Sounds cool to be able to just throw on a random episode without having to decide which one. I often enjoy having one playing in the background while doing other things.
I don’t see it on Pluto Canada, though. Oh well.
I actually don’t mind the Pluto ads. If you put Trek on in the background while working, I think you’ll find that they’re so repetitive yet non-annoying that you just mentally block them out.
Eh the annoying thing about Pluto is they have like four commercials that repeat. It’s tedious to hear the same ad every time.
That said, it’s free, and commercial breaks are the same frequency and duration of ordinary cable TV.
BellMedia has the licence for all things Star Trek in Canada.
So all the classic series are the weekday after school and evening reruns on CTV Sci-fi Channel, not free and still with ads.
We have all of it recording on our PVR constantly. Otherwise we have to subscribe to Crave and that’s not really the fit for us. Besides, there are several shows we like that are on the cable channel and not available on streaming.
PlutoTV works well though in the app on iPhones and iPads here. Not too many ads as yet, fewer it seems as compared to other free apps like CBC Gem etc.
Pluto TV also has season one of TOS, TNG, and VOY as on demand. I’m hoping they’ll add more seasons and Star Trek series as on demand. It would be nice to revisit a particular episode whenever I want. I’ll often have one of the Star Trek live TV channels going to watch or as background noise. So far, I think Pluto TV’s amount of commercial breaks on the shows and movies I watch there is a tolerable trade off for being free to watch.
ugh i gave it a shot and watched one of the Kelvin flicks on it, and it was interrupting it every 10-15 minutes to play the same commercial two or three times back to back. and the sound and video quality were pretty much unwatchable :(
I used to run a plugin on my Kodi that would make TV-style channels based on the original airing channel, complete with EPG and everything.
However, it wouldn’t let you add lists of shows and create channels that way. I never got around to making my version, but perhaps someone else has done the work since then.
The iPhone app is fine for me. I haven’t tried loading it into our smart TV.
Video and sound quality out of Pluto, when I tried it, was beyond unusable. :(
