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Engineering tech update: July 2023

(Warning – very technical)

Dark mode theme is here! Cleaned up the ‘playlist title’ which is moved to the left panel. Looks neater, quite happy with the look and feel atm.

Experimenting with custom user colours on slide groups. Should match with the left panel list items though.
Getting more logging. Oh, slide thumbnails can be resized now!
Song Editor WIP. The idea is that you work from left-to-right of screen: edit stanza lyric text, add line breaks to split long stanzas into multiple slides, then drag and drop song part arrangements on the right. Preview with the centre slide thumbnails.
SongSelect recently refreshed their platform – breaking existing APIs. Seems they didn’t want to version or maintain the old API – which I noticed broke some other paid app we do use 🥺🥺[I’ve since had to manually format new song imports twice already!]. I did have to rewrite the lyric file text parser for the new format.

NDI integration

…it is not really working 🙁

Platform changes:

My whole rendering is based on AvaloniaUI, which I cannot extract rendered Bitmaps from starting at the major 11.x release just recently. I’m waiting for an API (p.s. the guys at Avalonia are really smart!)

For the time being I am blocked at version 11.0-preview8

WIP alternate solution:

For lyrics feed:

  • I am testing out a live HTML page which can be added as a Browser overlay source in OBS Studio
  • Websockets + https://kit.svelte.dev/ + https://tailwindcss.com/

And for getting video and slide playback into OBS:

  • use NDI screen capture or Screen Capture HX https://www.ndi.tv/nvidia/ (requires NVIDIA GPU)

And for stage display:

  • I might have to use live HTML page here too.
  • Having NDI would’ve been nice for throwing onto an iPad which can sit on the preacher’s podium. I guess NDI screen capture also still works here too.