Hi Bill,
I read this entire thread today. I have learned a ton! I have been looking off and on for the past five years for an automation solution for the cable channel our church leases. I am not sure if your solution is a good fit for me or not; I will leave that up to you. Here is what we currently do:
One output of our BMD Videohub is connected to the cable company. During the week we have one instance of VNC looping a PowerPoint Slide deck saved as an MP4 with no sound. We have a second instance of VNC playing looping through a folder of mp3 audio files. This happens on a dedicated Windows PC (Cable PC). On Sunday at 9:00 pm we had been using our BMD Videohub to switch the input routed to the cable company from the Cable PC to our live broadcast feed. This is an instance of OBS on our Presentation PC compositing content from PowerPoint, live open captioning, a PTZ camera, and our audio mixer. This same live content is livestreamed to Boxcast though another VideoHub output to an encoder they provided. At the end of the live event we use the Videohub to restore the Cable PC content to our cable channel. Then at 1:30 PM a tech from second church in our community remotes into our cable PC via TeamViewer, pauses our audio playlist, opens a browser over our looping slide deck video and plays their YouTube live stream from the previous week. Approximately and hour later he closes the browser and resumes our audio playlist. At 3:30PM I connect via AnyDesk and open a single slide PowerPoint with a static image provided by third church in our community. This overlays our looping slide deck video. I pause our audio playlist, open a browser, load the sermons page from their website, and play the audio they recorded the previous Sunday evening. When their audio finishes, I close their webpage and PowerPoint, and I resume our audio playlist. I would absolutely LOVE to be able to automate this. I would also love to be able to add other content to our schedule such as broadcasts of special events from the schools and other churches in the area. I've never dared offer this without automation.
I have written a lot of industrial control software and a little PC software; I understand how software works, and doesn't, :P I think I could be a helpful beta tester if you think your program would be an adequate fit for us.
Hi Oi
Casttor works best on pre-recorded material.
1. casttor can't switch external equipment - never meant to do that. - you will still have to switch between live feed and casttor at the end of the live cast. Casttor has a secondary program that a runs off-the air program while waiting for the next video scheduled to run. You would run casttor with this off air program and set the next scheduled program to start , lets say at 10am. You would switch from your live program back to the cable pc , you would see casttor and then at 10, it would start the 10am segment. casttor would never know, you weren't using it's feed from 9 to 10. (all automated except video hub manual switch)
2. 1:30pm
It can stream a youtube video, but it has no idea when the sermon from last week ends and youtube goes on to the next program. Since this sermon is from last week, you could upload the video to a local file and we could run it from there because casttor would know the video length. It can't download files from youtube, you have to get the file during the week proceeding sunday. .So casttor knows the max length of the 1:30 video,
it will schedule that and when done, play the off air video until 2:30 or whatever you want. All automated, you do nothing.
3: 3PM
before sunday, you would cross-load the worship notes, and mp3, and casttorwould play the audio file. At the end of the audio file, it would again play the off air program to lets say 3:45. (all automated , you do nothing)
4. ' 3:45pm. Casttor would run the next scheduled program. You could run previous sermons, whatever for the rest of the week.
It's doable, but church 2 and 3 will have to copy their stuff to the pc cable local files.
I also did programming on robots, testers, ic reactors, customer demo software etc. It's a lot more fun when you can make lights blink.
Basically, your flow is a little different in that you only have to manually switch from casttor to live feed and back again at the 9am service.
The rest you would cross-load from the other churches before sunday, the mp4 previous weeks sermon (church 2) and the jpeg (worship notes) and mp3 from church 3. Church 2 and 3 would run autiomatically.
Does this make sense?
