Channel 99

Channel 99 is an NSV Stream - an early form of online streaming video.

NSV was born in 2003, popular until 2006, and died in 2013... or did it?

You can watch using MPV, VLC or Winamp.

I still run these streams for posterity's sake, preserving a form of IPTV from the pre-Youtube era.
With that, I try to stay as true as possible to the original circa 2003 technology.
Most of these streams are 240p (320x240) VP3.1 & MP3 audio. Bitrate ~256kbps.
I also have some experimental 720p HD streams using the same codecs.

The streams are all free to watch; no advertisements anywhere, ever.

But this isn't just an anachronistic techie nostalgia circle jerk.
As of 2024 I still actively update these with new content,
and NSV still has a small but dedicated cult following.

Come join us in bringing back retro IPTV!

The Channels
"Channel 99" has grown into a collection of streams,
check out the channels below!

Drag-and-drop a link below into MPV, VLC, or Winamp.
Or, click the link to download the .pls file and open later.

And check out our friends at the new NSV Directory thanks to CTT!
yp.stream-mich.de

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Channel99.moe
2024-02-03

News:
	-TWO new HD streams!!
	-New LTS is now running on Ch99 and Ch99 HD.
	-New LTS is ALSO running on Ch99-1/2!
	-Ch99 Classic is now running its new "pre-Y2K" playlist.
	-New Ch101 playlist is running.
	-Old Ch99-1/2 stuff moved to Ch42
	-Ch99 Weekend on 2/16

Happy Laughing Man day!

In real news:
New playlists active all around.
There are 14,516 files in the 99 LTS and 4,912 in the HD LTS this year.

The new Ch99 Classic has actually been active for almost a month, and it's already very popular, regularly beating the other 99's in viewership. It's certainly my personal preferred anime stream now as well.

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TWO new HD streams!!
At the risk of cheapening the yearly marathons I'm introducing Channels 2501 and 4869, which are 24/7 GITS and Detective Conan respectively.
These are both 720p HD, same as Ch99 HD.

2501 plays in the typical Ch99 order: Arise, Movies, SAC (and, at least for now, Pandora. Because I actually like it, and Korobase is most underrated waifu)

4869 is shuffled and has almost all episodes up to #1043. I'm missing #722-753 and #906-913. Mostly subtitled, except for the classic "Case Closed," the recent dub of eps #965-1005, and the dubbed movies. I *think* I got all the multi-episode stories combined to single files so the shuffle won't ruin them.

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Channel 99 1/2 has changed format to anime, and the existing content from 99 1/2 has been moved to the new Channel 42.

While making the 2024 LTS, I realized the playlist now far exceeds one year (!) at least with all the annual marathons thrown in.
So, to make sure all my anime gets airtime each calendar year, Channel 99 1/2 will now play the same LTS as 99, but it will start halfway through the playlist. There won't be any overlap, but you'll get some repeats on the opposing streams toward the end of the year.

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Channel 101 has finally been updated!
I don't have much new content on 101 this year, in fact the overall number of files on 101 has decreased for 2024.
But I made some major changes to the playlist which I hope will make the stream more enjoyable than it has been in 2023...
I reorganized the playlist order, as I do every year.
Moved a bunch of stuff over to Dropout- all the travelogue reels, medical reels, and Wild Kingdom (I've had about all I can take of Marlin Perkins' fucking voice).
Made some changes to the "Classic" slot, which has had John Romer removed (moved back to "History" slot) and Julius re-added. 
Also, for the first time ever, the "How It's Made" slot has been removed. The episodes are all still in rotation but have been absorbed into the "Engineering" slot.

As always, we'll see how this plays out over the next year.

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Other News

The next Channel 99 Weekend is scheduled for Friday 16 Feb, probably around 2100 GMT.
I have some promising anime lined up, look forward to it!

Speaking of Weekends Marathons, tomorrow (4 Feb 2024) is the 10th anniversary of the very first Channel 99 Weekend Marathon, and the birth of the "LTS" concept!

Not counting the upcoming one on 2/16, I've done 118 Weekend Marathons over the past 10 years, so about once a month, which is scary close to my original intent.

I'm very pleased with how the LTS has panned out over the past decade. I came up with the idea shortly after the death of the original SCTV directory; in that time of uncertainty I wanted to start moving away from the Ch99 project, while still keeping it running and regularly updated. The two big goals were to automate and acquire. Automate the playlist production, and acquire a shit load of anime. I have certainly done both.
When I started it, I set a goal of acquiring a full year of content, so that I could just shuffle everything once a year and be done with it. It's just a happy accident that I happened to reach that goal right around the 10 year anniversary. That said, I don't plan on stopping. That's why the new 99-1/2 exists. I'll just keep adding more anime until I get to 2 years, I guess!

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Behind the Scenes

The new "pre-y2k" 99 Classic playlist was created with a bash script I wrote to query all my titles to the AniDB API, and then collect the NSVs from my archive into the playlist based on release date. It was a fun little project.
I generated two lists- "pre-y2k" and "pre-Haruhi" (2006), just in case I ever want to expand this playlist. I consider Haruhi to be the turning point from "Classic" to "Modern" anime eras, but I'm sure many would disagree with that. Anyway, the problem is that 2000-2006 was a shameful period in anime in my opinion, so even if I do expand the playlist to include that era, it will be cherry-picked titles. I did already put a couple good anime from 2000 and 2001 into the classic playlist.
There is a bug in the script that caused several movies from post-y2k to be included due to having similar titles or words in the title. I got most of those out but I've caught at least one live on the stream.
The playlist should run for about 4-5 months, and the slots are of significantly different sizes, so as they repeat the playlist will shuffle a bit and should keep it from getting too stale. Otherwise, the playlist is now manually shuffled. I may add LTS-style shuffling next year.

I did some fine tuning on the "ch99 rescuer" bash script, which is used in case the server ever goes down. It re-serializes the playlist so I can restart it from where it left off, rather than from the beginning.
A modified version of that script was used to generate the new 99-1/2 playlist. Basically just re-serializing the 99 LTS from half way through, to offset it.

Also did some fine tuning on the LTS software which I completely re-wrote in Powershell a couple years ago. Nothing major, but the HD LTS now includes movie bumps (ie, it plays the 'movie bump' before a movie).

Did a little more PS scripting to handle combining the multi-episode Conan stories for the new Ch4869. 
Also a tiny bit of batch scripting for the same reason. I didn't want to have to re-encode all the existing multi-episode NSV files I had, but since NSV files are a streaming format you can literally just concatenate NSV files using 'copy.' I could've done this in PS but the native copy command actually works the fastest and I already had the 99NSVES batch script that handles drag and dropped files, so I just modified that script.

And of course all the little updates I've made to the site. Still all HTML4, PHP and MySql ^^

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