Archives for January 2018

Now I can stream from a PI Zero.

This is the plan (as published on PierToPier.net) 

Last year we used Andromeda (a Farr 11 sailboat) + an inverter , a camera and a laptop to stream a match racing regatta.

This year I plan to do better. 

• Put two tiny raspberry Pi zeros on each boat.
• Solder an antenna to each
• put a big omni an an AP on the Committee boat.
• put a backhaul link to the SC's NBN hard line.
• Sit on the boat with a mic and a directors chair and cutting to live feeds from the boats or video from the camera.

this was a bit of a pipe dream till today!

with out the WiFi setup what you need to do is:

• remove the dpkg version of ffmpeg from the pi (if its on there) get the static build from here https://johnvansickle.com/ffmpeg/
• Enable the PI cam in using the sudo raspi-config command an menu
• run up a nginx for windows server on the laptop. (this version) with rtmp
• add the ngiinix feed to OBS rtmp://127.0.0.1:1935/live/test
• stream to nginx with ffmpeg on the pi with:

​raspivid -o - -t 0 -w 1920 -h 1080 -fps 40 -b 8000000 -g 40 | ffmpeg -re -ar 44100 -ac 2 -acodec pcm_s16le -f s16le -ac 2 -i /dev/zero -f h264 -i pipe:0 -c:v copy -c:a aac -ab 128k -g 40 -strict experimental -f flv -r 30 rtmp://[laptopIpAddress]/live/test

this appears to work well - as in OK quality and frame rate. I'll do a proper how to on PierToPier.net later, after the rest of the todo list.

Todo:

• Solder an antenna connector to the Pi
• WaterProof PI
• Build a battery pack for Pi
• Build the back-haull net.
• Strap it to my Shaw 650 and test it to destruction 

​

I tried an Elliot 7 - it was slow.

Rugby Union Youtube Scoreboard for live streaming

I've been live streaming to youtube with my Rugby Club and Sailing Club. I've re-built an app to put an onscreen display, scores and countdown timer on the screen.

"How come the America's cup can't stream live but Darwin Sailing Club can?" Twitter. Patronising southern bastard. Me is why!

I used a bit of software from OBS's (Open Broadcast Studio) forums called Scoreboard+ last year. I prettied it up with Javascript and jquery. It had source code. yay!

here's my "Rugby Scoreboard":

 DOWNLOAD: scoreboard.zip

Written in QT, and built with Visual Studio (If i said I understood QT/VS I'd be lying). Source Code is in with it. here's the old version in action:

Should work pretty well for anyone live streaming using OBS on windows - should compile for a MAC if you have a MAC.

Main differences between my version and the original. 

• Some Java script and some artwork to go with the OBS browser plugin (Darwin Rugby Club Logos etc)
• Replaced the Team Names fields with a drop down read from a text file (edit: input/ShortNames.txt)
• Removed the Period options.
• Tweaks to defaults Time = 80 mins default, alt, bgrade and sevens duration.
• Set it to default to XML output.
• you shouldn't need to use the update team name button anymore. Changing the dropdowns does this.

Why? Well moslty to make it "idiot proof" the idea is for Rugby People to operate it, while I have a beer. Hence the dropdowns and setting 80:00 as the default time all I have to do is train them to start and count. And yes I'm a second row and a geek.

HowTo:

• Unzip
• edit input/ShortNames.txt to include your competitions team names. (hint keep them short, I sugest capitals) you can put the Long Version in LongNames.txt - put them in same order
• add a Browser Source in OBS studio to point to the file output/index.htm
• run the scoreboard.
• You might want to make some pretty graphics for each team. format is same as you used in ShortName.txt plus left.png or right.png appended to the end.