Watch local broadcast TV on Plex without an antenna.

What is it?

Locast is a free service that receives over the air (OTA) broadcast television signals and encodes and legally distributes them digitally across the internet. Using the program locast2plex you can receive this digital content and send it to a Plex Media Server. Plex will allow you to record, time-shift and save this content. It works exactly like a Cablebox / DVR.

Setup

The overall steps are:

• Create a free locast.org account
• Download locast2plex to a Raspberry Pi or similar Linux computer
• Configure Plex to use the locast2plex software

Download locast2plex from this git repo:

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git clone https://github.com/tgorgdotcom/locast2plex.git
# Change ownership to your user
chown -R pi:pi locast
python3 main.py

Click here if you want the short version

While visiting with family, I came across an old DirecTV remote that wasn’t working entirely. Some buttons wouldn’t register even after replacing the batteries, so I figured a quick cleaning was in order. I snapped a few pictures of the disassembly so they might be useful to others (you).