I built something called RetroBox TV. It’s my own miniature television network using a Raspberry Pi. The entire thing runs from a 128GB memory card, fits comfortably in my pocket and even works with a normal TV remote, but calling it a media player doesn’t really explain what it is.
I wanted to recreate the experience of watching television in the 80s and 90s. Not just the programmes, but everything surrounding them. The commercials, the presenters, the channel logos, the music videos, the strange little animations between shows and that wonderful feeling of not knowing what was going to be on next. It started as a little experiment and became one of the biggest personal projects I’ve ever taken on.
Remember When You Couldn’t Just Instantly Watch Anything?
These days we have streaming services with thousands of shows available whenever we want. Growing up, television was different. You switched it on and watched whatever was showing. Sometimes you caught an episode halfway through. Sometimes you missed the beginning of a movie and if you missed something, tough luck. Unless you recorded it on a VHS tape machine, it was gone.
That’s the feeling I wanted to create with this project. That feeling of discovering something nostalgic that you’d completely forgotten about.
Every channel on my RetroBox TV runs on its own schedule. If you switch to a channel, you might arrive halfway through an episode of Quantum Leap, near the end of a cartoon or just as a commercial break starts. Change to another channel and the original programme keeps progressing, even though you’re not watching it. In fact, every other channel continues progressing while you’re watching something else. It’s all controlled using carefully calculated timers, creating the illusion that every channel is broadcasting live, 24 hours a day. The shows generally begin on the hour or half-hour, with commercials and other material filling the gaps.
This is probably my favourite part of the whole project. The feeling that you’re actually missing something on another channel. When I was a kid, if you were watching a movie on M-Net, you might wonder what was playing on another channel. Switching over meant potentially missing something in your movie. There was no pause button on TV.
My Nostalgic Settings
I made the settings menu extremely customisable to fit everyone’s viewing experience. At the moment, I have it configured so I can demonstrate everything to friends and family. I can browse the programme index for each channel, see what episodes are available, display programme titles and years, skip through content, rewind and fast-forward. It’s useful for when I want to show someone visting just how much is packed into this little box, but that’s not how I’d necessarily want somebody to experience it. For example, imagine giving RetroBox TV to a child today who has grown up with YouTube and streaming services. I’d switch all those conveniences off. No skipping episodes. No rewinding. No fast-forwarding. No browsing through a list of shows and choosing what to watch.
The only thing they could do is change the channel.
If The Smurfs is halfway through an episode, that’s where they start watching. If the next programme is He-Man, they’ll have to wait until it starts. And they will have to sit through commercial breaks. So it can either be a convenient way to explore a huge nostalgic collection or a proper old-fashioned television experience.
Settings on TV Screen:
Settings in Browser:
I even built a search function that lets me find specific programmes, commercials, music videos, trailers and intros across the entire collection. It’s incredibly useful when I’m trying to find something particular or demonstrate the system. Of course, being able to search for exactly what you want defeats the whole idea of old-fashioned television, which is why I prefer keeping those conveniences out of the way when I’m simply haeva “channel on in the background.
Search on TV Screen:
Making A Custom Remote
Originally, I just wanted to control RetroBox with a normal TV remote, but then I thought it would be useful to control everything from my phone or computer. So I built a web-based remote. A few basic buttons gradually turned into something much, much bigger. Now I have an entire control panel showing which channel is playing, what I’m watching and how far through the programme I am. I can switch channels, adjust the volume, browse the programme guide, search my video collection and control playback. I worked a lot on making sure it had all the settigns I could ever want, from controls for managing channel order, configuring schedules, connecting to Wi-Fi and scanning external drives.
The whole thing works through a browser, whether I’m using my phone or sitting at my computer. It’s probably a little ridiculous how much functionality I’ve managed to squeeze into what was originally supposed to be a simple remote, but honestly, designing and improving it has become almost as entertaining as watching the television itself.
Remote on Phone and Web Browser:
The search functionality is also “instant”. Here i typed slowly so you can see what pops up when i do a search to watch the “Gargoyles” TV show.
Over 600 Commercials, 600 Music Videos, 600 Movie Trailers and so much more
Here’s where the project became slightly ridiculous. I didn’t want RetroBox TV to feel like a playlist of randomly collected old videos. I wanted the content to feel authentic. So I started collecting…and collecting…and collecting some more.
I’ve gathered over 600 vintage television commercials, more than 600 music videos and over 600 movie trailers, not to mention a bunch of movies, documentaries, tv shows alongside an enormous collection of cartoons, sitcoms, channel animations, presenters presenting the “up next” content, station identification videos and so much more nostalgic material. There’s even dedicated channels for movie trailers, intros of famous and forgotten shows, a channel for all the commercials I have on the system.
Finding all of this content was just the beginning of an enormous headache. Many of the videos I found were terrible quality, incorrectly cropped, stretched, blurry or taken from old VHS recordings. I spent countless hours searching for the best available versions, cropping, enhancing, resampling and adjusting videos so they would look right on this device.
Sometimes I’d find an old Rolo commercial, which would remind me of another Rolo advert. That would send me searching for different versions, which would remind me of another commercial I’d completely forgotten about. Before I knew it, I’d spent hours going down another nostalgic rabbit hole for just a couple of videos. Not all the content is available on YouTube. Finding it meant digging through old archives and obscure corners of the internet. I would constantly make notes while searching for something specific. So I wouldn’t forget something I wanted to add. It became a constant cycle of remembering something, researching it, finding something else, making a note, preparing the video and then remembering another ten things I wanted to add.
My list of things to find seemed to grow faster than my collection and I wasn’t just downloading the first video I found. If there were five different recordings of the same commercial, I’d try to find the best-quality version. To say this was a huge challenge is an understatement.
Movie Trailers List:
Making It Feel Real
One of my favourite examples is the MTV channel. I didn’t want it to simply play one music video after another. Remember those weird and wonderful MTV logo animations that used to appear between music videos? Those little animated bumpers were part of MTV’s identity. I’ve collected hundreds of them JUST for the MTV channel. So when a music video finishes, it plays one of those classic MTV animations before continuing with another music video.
Occasionally, while watching MTV, you’ll come across Beavis and Butt-Head, Celebrity Deathmatch or MTV Cribs.There’s also a separate VH1 channel dedicated entirely to Pop-Up Video, with those little information bubbles appearing during the music videos.
I took the same approach to the commercials. You wouldn’t expect to see regular household Afrikaans product advertising between MTV music videos. The children’s channels have toy commercials, while Cartoon Network has its own recognisable advertising and bumpers of shows like Johnny Bravo, Dexter’s Laboratory, Scooby-Doo. So I organised commercials into categories and created rules to make sure the right material plays on the right channels. It was a surprisingly complicated part of the project, because I didn’t want random advertising ruining the atmosphere of a channel.
Every channel also has its own logo, which automatically adjusts its position depending on the video’s aspect ratio and resolution. Whether you’re watching an old 4:3 recording or something more modern, the logo sits where it should and is added automatically on top of the video. The programmes have proper titles and years attached to them, so you can optionally see exactly what you’re watching.
Wide Video with TV Logo:
Square Video with TV Logo:
These might sound like tiny details, but together they make an enormous difference in the experience.
Recreating South African Television
Being South African, I particularly wanted to recreate the television experience I remember growing up with. M-Net, K-TV, Afrikaans shows, the local presenters, local programmes. I put so much on it. I even recreated the moment when M-Net Open Time finishes for the night every night at 19:00 if you are on the M-Net channel, complete with that brief picture wobble before the channel becomes scrambled for viewers without an M-Net decoder. It’s a tiny detail that probably means absolutely nothing to somebody who didn’t grow up watching South African television. But if you watched M-Net, you remember it. There’s something strangely satisfying about recreating a technical annoyance from 30 years ago because you actually miss it.
Rather than recreating EVERY old South African channel individually, I built a dedicated SA-TV channel that brings together programmes and television moments from different eras.
You might catch an old weather report from TV1, a news broadcast from SABC2, or an episode of Tropical Heat, Liewe Heksie or Zet. There are familiar presenters like Candice Hillebrand and Scot Scott, along with children’s television memories such as Reggies Rush and Mousetrap. You might switch to it in the morning and catch a Cartoon Episode of La Linea or Grootbek en Katvis or a workout with Body Beat on GMSA. On Saturday mornings,it shows classic K-TV, with the kind of programmes that made getting up early with a bowl of cereal so worth it. Such as Freakazoid, Gargoyles and Darkwing Duck.
It’s actually been quite an experience researching all of this, because I’d forgotten how much television we watched growing up. Some of the things I found brought back memories I didn’t even realise I still had in the back of my mind.
One of the many “bumpers” between shows:
Every Channel Has Its Own Personality
Once I’d recreated the television channels I remembered, I started thinking about something else. What if I could create the channels I wished existed when I was a kid? Before DStv came along with dedicated channels like Cartoon Network, we didn’t really have the luxury of watching our favourite type of programme 24 hours a day. You watched cartoons when the broadcasters decided to show cartoons. So I thought, why not create my own channels? So i made dedicated channels for Looney Tunes, Sitcoms, Pixar and Horror.
I researched the most popular and highly regarded content, looked at ratings and recommendations, then combined those with my own personal favourites. I carefully selected the episodes and organised them with the correct titles and release years. I did this with so many shows, ranging from Gummi Bears, Dungeons & Dragons to BraveStarr, ThunderCats and The Real Ghostbusters.
There’s a sci-fi channel featuring The X-Files, Quantum Leap, Time Trax, Mystery Science Theatre 3000, Space Ghost Coast to Coast and other favourites. I even included Discovery and National Geographic-inspired channels featuring some of my favourite wildlife footage. The animal content is mostly modern, but I think incredible footage of wildlife is timeless.
Every channel has its own index showing the programme list. For example, if I am on the Looney Tunes and I click the list button, it shows this.
Video Store To Browse Covers
One of the most enjoyable parts of the project was recreating the experience of walking into an old video rental shop. You can browse through shelves of VHS covers, examine the front and back of the boxes and choose something to watch. I spent an absurd amount of time finding good-quality scans of those covers.
You can view each one’s full VHS cover, because reading the back of a video box was half the fun of choosing a movie and I really wanted the covers to look good enough on screen that you felt like you were standing in a video store. Some of those scans were surprisingly difficult to find.
But I didn’t stop at recreating the video store itself. Remember getting home from the video store with a few rented movies, stacking the tapes on top of the video recorder and trying to decide which one to watch first? I wanted to recreate that feeling too. So I designed another menu that looks like an old VHS player sitting next to a television, complete with a stack of movie tapes. You can cycle left and right through the movies until you find something you feel like watching. It’s a tiny detail, but I love how it brings back that familiar feeling of having a handful of movies to choose from on a Friday or Saturday night.
And when you select something, it doesn’t simply start playing the full film. There’s a VHS-style startup experience, complete with the familiar tape sounds, distributor logos, FBI warnings and even that infamous You Wouldn’t Steal a Car anti-piracy advert. I wanted it to feel like you’d just put a tape into your video recorder.
When you press play on the video:
I even have FBI warnings. Each time you play it shows a different one.
I have a bunch of random videos that play after this from old VHS tapes such as trailers and reminders to “adjust tracking” before the movie starts..
All of This Fits on a 256GB Memory Card
One of the things that still amazes me about this porject is how much content I’ve managed to squeeze onto this memory card. We’re so used to HD and 4K video these days that it’s easy to forget how small standard-definition video files can be. Most of the programmes I’m collecting were originally broadcast in standard definition anyway, so I don’t see the point of trying to make everything look artificially modern. The only thing that is DVD quality is “The Matrix”, which is on the DVD menu (yes, complete with DVD menus).
But I’ve carefully resized and compressed the content to keep file sizes manageable without making it look like a mess of pixels. In fact, there’s something charming about the softer, slightly imperfect picture. It reminds me of watching television on an old CRT screen. The quality actually adds to the experience. Within a few minutes, you completely forget that you’re not watching HD. You’re too busy enjoying the content. All those commercials, music videos, movie trailers, cartoons, sitcoms, movies, channel animations and countless other bits of nostalgic television fit onto a single 256GB card (And with plenty of room to spare).
If I ever run out of space, I can simply connect a flash drive or external hard drive and expand the collection, but for now, I still find it incredible that something so small can contain so much television history and the box itself is tiny enough to carry around in my pocket. A whole two decades of television in my pocket. Try explaining that to somebody in 1989.
Watching The Content
The funny thing about RetroBox TV is that it’s surprisingly difficult to explain properly. I can show you screenshots of the menus, tell you about the thousands of videos or demonstrate the settings, but none of that really captures what makes it special. You need to switch on a channel, recognise a forgotten commercial, laugh at an old presenter, change channels and suddenly discover an episode of something you haven’t thought about in 30 years.
Maybe you stop on MTV because a favourite music video is playing. Then you switch to K-TV, catch a cartoon halfway through and decide to stay. A familiar advert appears and suddenly you’re remembering something you haven’t seen since you were a child. That’s exactly what happened when I showed it to my girlfriend. What was supposed to be a quick demonstration turned into four hours of us watching old television shows, laughing at forgotten commercials, remembering things from our childhood and switching channels just to see what was on.
The interesting thing was that we weren’t watching a specific movie or binge-watching a series. We were simply “enjoying television”. The way we used to.
I’ve shown RetroBox TV to a few friends and family members and several have asked whether I’d consider selling it. Unfortunately, RetroBox TV isn’t something I can sell or share. Much of the experience depends on the enormous collection of copyrighted television shows, movies, commercials and music videos I’ve spent weeks collecting, editing and preparing specifically for this system. Without that content, it simply wouldn’t be the same experience. So it’s staying exactly what I originally intended it to be: a personal passion project and something really cool I wanted to add to my own television.
I’m still working on it, though. I’ve got a few more ideas I’d love to add, and I suspect it’s going to be one of those projects that’s never truly finished. Every time I think I’m done, I remember another cartoon, commercial or forgotten piece of television history that absolutely has to be included and I quickly add it.
Here is just a quick demo. (Apologies for the quality; I recorded it with my phone and compressed it as much as I could)
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