# I Vibecoded a ShoutCAST successor

A few weeks ago I fell down a nostalgia rabbit hole about Winamp — specifically SHOUTcast TV. If you're too young to remember: in the early 2000s, Winamp had a directory of radio *and TV* stations run by random individual people. Not platforms. People. You'd open the directory and find a channel where some guy in Ohio was streaming a Toonami block he'd curated himself, or 24/7 kung fu movies, or anime with commercial bumpers he'd recorded off actual TV. You were watching someone's *taste*. It felt like being handed the remote to a stranger's brain.

So I went looking to see if SHOUTcast still existed in that form. It doesn't. The radio side limped along under various owners, but SHOUTcast TV is long dead, and its video format — **NSV, Nullsoft Streaming Video** — died with it. NSV was a weirdly great piece of engineering for its time: a dead-simple container built by Nullsoft (~2003) to push video over the same infrastructure as SHOUTcast radio, usually VP3/VP6 video with MP3/AAC audio. Its killer feature was resilience — the stream re-synced constantly, so you could tune into the middle of a broadcast on dial-up-adjacent internet and it just *worked*, like turning on a TV mid-show. Then the Nullsoft crew left AOL, the format got orphaned, and the whole idea of person-to-person TV got paved over by YouTube and Twitch — which are great, but they aren't this. An algorithm feeding you clips is not a stranger programming a channel.

(Obligatory shoutout: [pracdev.org/channel99](https://pracdev.org/channel99/) still hosts NSV-formatted content that plays in Winamp **to this day**. Absolute heroes of format preservation. Go tune in with a 20-year-old media player and feel something.)

Nobody was going to rebuild this, so I vibecoded it. It's called **ZenderTV**.

- Point the Broadcaster app at a folder of videos or music, hit **ON AIR**, and your channel appears in a public guide where anyone can tune in
- A scheduler with *dayparts* (Saturday morning cartoons at 8am, horror after midnight), bumpers that cut in every N items, and Winamp-style bag shuffle
- Viewers get a channel guide + player app. No accounts, no platform, no algorithm — you can't rewind, you can't pick an episode, you just *tune in* to whatever's on
- Relay mode so broadcasters don't expose their home IP
- Tech: Tauri + Svelte apps, a Node/ffmpeg channel server (transcode once, then stream forever at near-zero CPU — a Raspberry Pi can run a channel), HLS out, directory + relay on Fly.io

The vibecoding honesty section: the AI and I shipped a version where item transitions had *never actually worked* — ffmpeg silently ignores playlist entries appended after launch, and the "working" stream was secretly crash-looping between files. Finding that took a genuinely fun debugging session of proving the assumption false with a 7-second experiment, then rebuilding the streaming engine around per-item HLS continuation. The whole thing — apps, servers, CI building installers for macOS/Windows/Linux — got built in evenings across a couple of weeks.

Repo + downloads: https://github.com/Hmmnd0/ZenderTV (builds are unsigned for now — the README has the one-liner to get past Gatekeeper/SmartScreen)

If you ever ran or watched a SHOUTcast TV station, I'd love to hear what was on it. And if you spin up a channel, post it — I'll be watching the guide.

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### Screenshots

**Channel guide**

![Channel guide](https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Hmmnd0/ZenderTV/main/docs/viewer-guide.png)

**Broadcasting**

![Broadcasting](https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Hmmnd0/ZenderTV/main/docs/broadcaster.png)
