Computer controlled TV station and cameras

Going forward I would like to improve the OpenCV tracking system, as CV and AI has come along way in the time since I first wrote it.

Also I would like to improve the playlist manager web app such that a schedule can be printed out to give residents some idea of what is on at what time.

So after some time it was realised it would be good to put some extra content on the "Live Events" channel when there were no live events being streamed (which is most of the time).

So i had to make a playlist system to play the media we wanted at set times, as well as the lounge camera stream when a scheduled event was there.

Only problem was that now the lounge stream camera only came on at set times (rather than being on 24/7) we had to have a way to manually activate that stream playback for 1-3 hours when needed and interrupt any media playback that might be happening.

I made it so you can pause the schedule for a chosen time if you want to show a youtube video, as you can also remote desktop into the computer with anydesk and what ever content you open people will see, such as youtube website.

So I made a web interface for remote controlling this: (note while we do have provision in the copyright legislation for using media transcoded from dvds we own for accessibility reasons, i have blurred to avoid confusion)

So covid happened, and it really impacted us, not so much the disease itself but all the precautions and increased workload which we are still dealing with today in 2023.

For a long time we could not hold our weekly happy hour event, so I made a way to use off the shelf tablet and rtsp streaming app to stream an entertainer from a room other than the main lounge to all our residents rooms who where now all stuck in their rooms !

I wrote a python script to via cron check the ip of the tablet for an active stream, and play it via vlc. and when not active close vlc.

This is still a useful feature for if we have events not in the main lounge.

For the first couple of years we used the existing 2 channel standard definition rf modulator, one channel for live stream and one channel for dvd playback.

Then we got a good deal on a professional used 4 channel HD modulator, so we could now see the full quality of our camera footage as well as add 2 more channels !

The next stage was to develop the software and hardware solution required to automate the use of the cameras PAN/TILT & 20x Optical ZOOM features via its IP control API/Interface

It was decided to use a dedicated second camera that could always see the full scene, rather than running CV/Image recognition on the main camera, because if the main camera was zoomed in on a performer it would not see some action outside of its vision to zoom out to capture.

I set up a raspberry pi 3 and camera running openCV software and a simple python change/movement detect loop to watch a chosen section of the pi camera (excluding audience at bottom of screen) . This then calculated a target and zoom level to command the PTZ camera to focus on.

There was also a time sequence to for example every 5 minutes zoom right at and do a slow pan left and right to 'look around' before resuming focus on the main action.

The Pi had a calibrated conversion table to convert its pixel coordinates into corresponding tracking commands and zoom levels for the PTZ camera.

Ive since switched the pi and camera combo for a ip camera, and made it that the opencv script is run by the "Live Streams" computer that receives the PTZ stream.

After the successful proof of concept streams, and manually broadcasting several key events for the residents it was approved to fund and permanently disconnect one of the (less used) DVD players and plug a spare computer into this modulator input permanently and have it just constantly play a live stream from a new PTZ camera and mic mounted on the roof in the lounge room.

As a proof of concept and by spending as least amount of money as possible, I lugged my home computer, DSLR, and microphone to one of our weekly work performances. The computer ran CasparCG playout software, and had a decklink HDMI capture card, for video input from the camera. This computer streamed the video via UDP over the facility wifi to another office computer that had a cheap ATI graphics card added to it to give S-Video output which fed into the existing SD modulator instead one of the DVD players, and from there into the buildings tv network and every TV.