Stage Audio Works

obs-multisite

Control a Multisite broadcast from Companion: start and stop the event at the main site, and drive a campus feed's timeslipping — play, hold, catch up, jog — with buttons that light up to show what is actually happening.

It can drive either end of the system: OBS running the obs-multisite plugin, or a campus player appliance, which has no OBS and answers over its own HTTP interface. Pick which when you add the connection; the buttons are the same.

Configuration

• Connect to — OBS or a campus player appliance.
• Host — where that machine is. 127.0.0.1 if Companion is on the same machine.
• Port — leave 0 for the default: 4455 for OBS, 8080 for a campus player.
• OBS WebSocket password — OBS only, from Tools → WebSocket Server Settings, if you set one.

For OBS you also need the obs-multisite plugin loaded (Tools → Multisite, or a Multisite source in the scene) and the WebSocket Server turned on. The module opens its own connection, so the host, port and password are the same values you may have given the OBS Studio module — Companion modules each own their connection.

For a campus player there is nothing to switch on, and no password: the appliance's interface is guarded by the network it is on and by its own Lock.

Actions

Main site (encoder) — OBS only. A campus player only ever receives, so these are not offered against one.

• Go live — start the event. Leave the name blank to name it with the current time, exactly as the dock does.
• End the broadcast — finish cleanly.
• Drop a marker — pick one of the markers the main site published, or type your own. The list is the main site's configured cues, and fills in as soon as it is connected.

Campus (decoder)

• Play / Stop / Hold / Resume — the transport. Hold keeps the picture on screen and stops advancing; Resume continues from where it stopped.
• Catch up to live — jump to the live edge.
• Return to the room — stop playing a past recording and follow whatever the room is live with.
• Jog — step forward or back by a number of seconds (negative goes back).
• Seek — go to a clock time within the recording (seconds from midnight).
• Sit behind live — hold a constant delay behind live. Zero returns to the live edge.
• Jump to a marker — go to a cue. The list is this room's markers: the ones any site has actually dropped, on either end, each showing the site that set it. A cue dropped while you are watching appears in the list by itself.
• Campus: Drop a cue — drop a cue with a name of your own from this campus. Every site sees it, carrying this box's site name, so a cue set here is never mistaken for the main site's.
• Load a recording — play a past event from this room. Pinning does not follow the room afterwards.
• Refresh the recordings list — ask the room what it has recorded. The list is filled in when the module connects; this is for after an event ends.

Any obs-multisite request — call any command of the plugin by name, with a JSON object. The escape hatch for a command a newer plugin has that this module does not yet.

Feedbacks

• Encoder: the broadcast is live (OBS only)
• Encoder: the link is degraded or offline (OBS only)
• Decoder: playing / held / buffering / loading
• Decoder: no source on this machine — the fix is in the scene collection, not on the surface.
• Decoder: the recording has ended
• Decoder: more than N seconds behind live
• Decoder: the link is degraded or offline

A link reading is only shown once it is a real measurement; before anything has been tried it is blank rather than "healthy".

Variables

Encoder (OBS only): encoder_live, encoder_status, encoder_event_id, encoder_event_name, encoder_room, encoder_confirmed, encoder_pending, encoder_retries, encoder_bytes, encoder_upload_rate, encoder_link, encoder_colo, encoder_version.

Decoder: decoder_state, decoder_have_source, decoder_playing, decoder_held, decoder_buffering, decoder_loading, decoder_ended, decoder_behind_live, decoder_playhead, decoder_live, decoder_cached_segments, decoder_link, decoder_current_marker, decoder_event_id, decoder_room, decoder_version.

Against a campus player, a few of the decoder's are simply blank because the appliance does not publish them: decoder_current_marker and decoder_version. decoder_have_source always reads yes, since a player is always meant to be playing something.

Presets

Two banks — Multisite: main site (Go live, End, status) and Multisite: campus (Play, Hold, Resume, Catch up, Return to the room, Jog either way, status) — with the feedbacks already attached. Only the campus bank is offered against a campus player.

Under each bank there is also a Markers group (main site) or a Cues group (campus) with one button per cue, already named: Sermon Start, Offering, and so on. Those are generated from the markers in play, so they change as the main site's configuration and the room's markers do. The campus bank also carries a Drop a cue group: one button whose name you set, to drop a cue from this campus under the site name configured on that box.