Create Your Own TV Channels on XBMC (Smart Playlists)

XBMC supports creating a playlist, meaning you can queue up several shows and then let it play through those shows on a playlist. Sometimes though, you just want to watch a certain kind of show, but don’t know specifically what you want to watch, like a TV channel. In such a case, Smart Playlists are a handy little feature.

It’s a pretty simple process to set up a Smart Playlist from within XBMC. Simply follow these instructions:

1. Select “Videos” from the main screen
2. Select “Playlists”
3. Select “Smart Playlists”
4. Adjust the settings to create your new Smart Playlist

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XBMC Wiki has a great detailed walk-through of how to set each of the settings and what the available options are for different types of Smart Playlists.

You can also create your own playlists using a text editor like the one I have below. This Smart Playlist is for a “Mythbuters TV” Smart Playlist that I created. Once you create the file, you save it as a .xsp file and then upload it to the userdata folder (check the wiki to find the userdata folder for your platform).

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="yes" ?>
<smartplaylist type="episodes">
 <name>Mythbusters TV</name>
 <match>all</match>
 <rule field="tvshow" operator="contains">
 <value>MythBusters</value>
 </rule>
 <limit>25</limit>
 <order direction="ascending">random</order>
</smartplaylist>

The bit of code above says to compile a playlist of TV show episodes (25 of them), where the TV show title contains the word “MythBusters”. Once you’ve uploaded the file, restart XBMC, go to playlists, bring up the context menu and hit “play”. Enjoy your MythBusters marathon.