[PLUG-AV] Another experiment in updating our AV workflow

[James Henstridge]

On Tue, 9 Mar 2021 at 10:23, James Henstridge <james at jamesh.id.au> wrote:
> The eventual goal is to allow the different parts to self configure.
> If you turn the camera nodes on first, then the OBS machine should
> connect to them when it starts.  If the OBS machine starts first, it
> will wait until the cameras come online, and plug them into the scenes
> you've set up previously.  If everything works correctly, then the
> RTSP sender machines could easily be headless: the RTSP server would
> start on boot, and Avahi would advertise the camera once it gets a
> DHCP address.

I think I've got this part of the plugin working now.  The source is
now gets you to choose a service name for the stream (e.g. "Camera-A"
in the sample rtsp-sender.conf), providing an option list of all
available cameras on the local network.  When the camera drops from
the network, the underlying ffmpeg_source is reconfigured with an
empty URL, and when it appears again we configure it with the new URL.
This means that OBS reconnects to the camera almost instantly when it
becomes available.

So that pretty much covers what I wanted from an auto-configuration
stand-point.  If you set up all the OBS scenes you want for a
broadcast in advance, it would pretty much be a case of plugging
everything in and having it self organise.  There is no need for a
display on the sender machines, so it could easily be a Raspberry Pi
like I demoed this week.  We could even store the Pi and capture card
wired together, so setup would only involve connecting power,
ethernet, and HDMI.

James.