Control for livestream

This provides two control services for OBS:

• A control panel that allows switching scenes, muting/unmuting audio, and so on.
• A live preview.

These are local applications running in Python Tkinter, so should work on any operating system (if not, that's a bug).

Installation

zipapp

This doesn't work anymore since there are compiled modules needed to play sound.

Local install

Create a virtual environment. Note that obsws-python unfortunately requires Python 3.9+. On Linux with pip, sound output requires a compiler, libasound2-dev, and python3-dev (on other platforms, a pre-built package has what you need).

$ pip install https://github.com/coderefinery/obs-cr/archive/master.zip

Usage

If you are just using this: The broadcaster should give you the respective commands to run and you don't need to worry.

There is control.py to make a control panel, and preview.py to give a preview.

obs-cr-control HOSTNAME:PORT PASSWORD
obs-cr-preview HOSTNAME:PORT PASSWORD [--delay S]

• obs-cr-control --small starts a small panel, designed for the most critical indicators and buttons on a crowded teacher's screen. It doesn't replace or have everything of the full panel (you need the full panel open somewhere else, or a separate director).
• obs-cr-control --test will run without connecting to OBS. Not everything works and there might be visible tracebacks, but you can test the general things out.

obs-cr-control

This is a streaming control panel. There are tooltips that explain most things, but just open it up and see.

This is synced with OBS (it uses OBS as the synchronization server itself, which is cool). Anything RED indicates something may be live. "Indicators" are synced lights: click a light on any control panel, and it's synced across all of them.

• --small shows a smaller window, suitable for instructors who don't want to do a lot of control.
• --broadcaster enables extra options that only make sense on the broadcaster's computer (like sharing the broadcaster's screen)
• --resolution-command is a command that resizes the Zoom screenshare window. WIDTH and HEIGHT get replaced by the desired window size.
• --notes-window is a regex which matches a window title. This is taken to be the "notes window" and enables the buttons that scroll the notes up/down. Linux only for now.

obs-cr-preview

This shows a live preview with less latency than the stream shows. Use --delay S to set the delay to S seconds, the default is 1 which might be a bit too slow. This is an relatively space-inefficient screenshot, so try not to make it too close to realtime. 0.2 is probably fine, even 0.1.

Cheatsheet

Commands for copying and pasting

• Linux, Firefox: obs-cr-control localhost:4445 TOKEN --notes-window='^TTT4HPC 07/05/2024.*Privat()e' --resolution-command="xdotool search --onlyvisible --name '^Zoom$' windowsize WIDTH HEIGHT;" --broadcaster

Status

In development, not recommended for general use unless you want to go into the code.