8balltv.github.io

Welcome to the 8balltv.github.io repository. The repo contains a client-side, JavaScript approach to finding and playing the scheduled 8BallTV video at the correct playback time.

Local Development Set-up

Follow these steps to test out the scheduler on your own machine

1. Git Clone this project.
   • For help, click here. Note the directory where you cloned the project on your local machine.
2. Open the Terminal application on your MacOS.
3. Use the "cd" command to navigate to the directory of the project.
4. On your terminal application, run python3 -m http.server 8000 --bind 127.0.0.1
   • If you get a -bash: python3 command not found, that means you don't have the Python interpreter installed on your computer. To do so, go here.
5. Open Google Chrome
6. Go to "http://localhost:8000/"
7. Open the developer console using CMD + Option + i.
8. You'll notice that the console is logging the current video and playback time, in accordance with the Google Sheets Schedule.

System Design

At a high-level, we parse the Google Sheet file, find the correct video and its playback time for the current time, and set the video on the video player.

Schedule

The schedule lives in an Google sheet titled "8BALLTV" scheduler, which can be found here. There is one sheet per day of the week, and each day is divided into fifteen minute intervals starting at 00:00 and going until 24:00. For each time slot, there are two columns that are necessary for the parser to function correctly- File Name and Part #. Additional columns provide video metadata.

Parser

The parser/index.js script is the primary script for the scheduler. It asynchronously parses the schedule by converting the Google Sheet into a Tab Separated Values (TSV) file and formatting the data for our use. We use a TSV file rather than a Comma Separated Values (CSV) file because some of our titles have commas in them, and using CSV wouldn't be able to parse these titles. It then calls the main callback, in which we find and set the current video and schedule subsequent video loads.

For more information about how we find the correct video file and the playback time, consult the Note section below.

External Libraries

PapaParse

We use the PapaParse library to parse the scheduler's TSV file. The library allows us to asynchronously parse a remote TSV file, and pass the results into the aforementioned main callback. The library claims to be the fatest browser-based TSV parser out there.