Request: OBS-Studio : Add URL for the Text-Source

darealal

darealal

New Member
Hi there,

currently it is only possible to get text from a file or from the edit-field. I think it would be a great enhancement if
to add a URL Source. Not display a webpage like the Browsersource but just the possibility to get the test from
a URL.

Anyway, keep up the excellent work !

Greets from germany.

DarealAL
 
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StrikeDaMic

New Member
Sorry for resurrecting a thread, but I highly support this. Admins, is this a feature? I saw a thread from 2014 where someone said it was planned,.
 
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OZZYGaVa

New Member
I'd also like to see being able to capture test form a remote http URL and then be able to format colour / side. The reason is I'm using a bot on a vps and want to display remote files within the stream
 
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jmiller

New Member
The problem with this is that there is more to a webpage than the text you see on the surface. An HTTP response body can contain hundreds of lines of HTML that need to be parsed, and the method of parsing would need to be different for everyone using plugin, because not everyone is retrieving text from the same URL, and, even if they were, they might not be interested in the same text.

I can't see this becoming a feature any time in the near future. I would recommend creating a local HTML file that retrieves content from the desired URL using an asynchronous (AJAX) JavaScript request. You could then display the retrieved text however you so desire by including it with the Browser Source plugin.
 
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DaveLinger

New Member
jmiller said:
The problem with this is that there is more to a webpage than the text you see on the surface. An HTTP response body can contain hundreds of lines of HTML that need to be parsed, and the method of parsing would need to be different for everyone using plugin, because not everyone is retrieving text from the same URL, and, even if they were, they might not be interested in the same text.
Click to expand...

On the other hand, it's easy for me to make a URL output a specific text-only response. This opens up the possibility of me using server-side code to determine the contents of a text box. There's no reason to leave the feature off the table completely just because it's not compatible with all URLs.

Also in 2012 an admin said it was in the works: https://obsproject.com/forum/threads/text-source.282/#post-1576
 
Tormy

Tormy

Member
Any news on that? I need to get a picture from the website.
The link to the picture is written on a TXT file by SAM Broadcaster.
Then I would like OBS to get that URL and to take the picture from the site and show it up.
 
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jasondeanny

New Member
We use a UDP stream to send data from a scoreboard to a PC listening for the data. It would great if the Text input could read the UDP data and allow us to pick specific parts of the data to display.
 
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Dysp

New Member
How is this still not a thing. Absolutely needed! This would be a great way to add dynamic scoreboards, playercards with data etc for more professional esports game casting. And yes, an url CAN return plain text only. You can read the text from file now, it would be very simple to add an URL as an option too.
 
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sportStream

New Member
Hi, I also need dynamic scoreboard. I will livestream sport competetions and want to update screen texts (results) from 3.party SportTiming software. Is there any way to do it with websocket?
 
BionicClick

BionicClick

Member
why not just have the browser open to your webpage and add a text OBS input that reads from a file. use the temporary internet file your browser downloads? you would probably want to control the webpage yourself and remove all HTML markup and only have the text there?

it will work.
 
RandomHost

RandomHost

New Member
Of course, "the temporary internet file" as you call it is absolutely not designed to be used for anything else but allowing the browser to load pages faster on subsequent requests. Also, one would have to figure out which of the dozens of cache files actually contains the page in question. Good luck figuring that out without digging deep into the internal mechanisms of the browser. There is also no guarantee that the browser will even have a cache file.

I also wonder how you would go about the "control the webpage yourself and remove all HTML markup" task. This isn't exactly a straightforward thing to do and even software which claims to do this type of thing sometimes fails - especially when the HTML is not 100% standards compliant - which then yields unpredictable results.

What you actually want to do in this case is fire up your IDE and write a proper script in whichever programming language you prefer which fetches the data directly from the source and transforms it into a suitable format.

With the lack of URL sources for text in OBS, I currently see two options to get that data into OBS:

1. By building a website which can be used with the browser source plugin.
2. By exporting the data into text files which can be fed to OBS via a standard text source.

I'm personally using the first variant where I build most of my overlays as a huge website which acts as sprite which I can then crop accordingly so I can move the individual elements around as I need them.

And since everything is on one page, I only require a single browser source which I can re-use in all of my scenes.

Anyway, things would be much more convenient if OBS actually supported loading plain text from URLs.
 
bradyns

bradyns

New Member
FreemanQC said:
Ressurecting this thread again, come on add this!
Click to expand...

Came here whilst searching for a solution and was surprised to see the thread bumped not long back.

This seems like a feature that should be in the main branch for text functionality, even if it's seldom used.
 
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DVWHaus

New Member
This streamCD widget might be just what you're looking for. The texts cannot be loaded from a file, however you can add up to 10 distinct texts / widgets. It's easy because you won't have to setup various sources for different texts. @XBStyx is doing a fantastic job with that app; if you have a specific widget in mind, he might be able to make one for you. Following a suggestion on Discord, the widget below was just added.

You can have a look over it https://streamcd.net


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