CasparCG: I'm new to it; bring me up to speed!

Where can I find a step-by-step resource, explained in bunny-rabbit terms, that brings one up-to-speed? I will be starting from scratch and need a resource that is easy to digest. That way I won’t be bothering you all with questions that elicit simple answers/ solutions. I want to become a resource for clients and friends like you guys. Here’s what I need to accomplish:
I need to schedule programming that is time-accurate (the client handles this) to send a 1080p/29.97/320mb stream of that programming from where I am to my CDN. I need to understand it because I have to be able to duplicate it for youth and adult RTF programs in the private school sector.
My upload capacity is supposed to be at around 15MB.

See this page List of CasparCG clients The PlayoutAutomation programed by TVP could be the solution you are looking for. But there are also other clients mentioned on the page.

Thanks, @didikunz. I am lookng at it now…

I would do that in two steps. play out clips through a NDI-channel (Newtek iVGA) from CasparCG, receive the channel in another computer (in the same subnet) that has OBS (and NDI-plugin) and stream it to the CDN from OBS. That way I feel I would have a much better control of what I am sending. And the specs of a OBS-machine isnt so high-end.
br markus

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Thanks for this nugget. Just took a look at this technology and from what I can see, that would change a lot for me. It is a bit of an overwhelming thought, though. So many thoughts came to mind that any intelligible information became muddled in the den of noise.
I totally get what you are suggesting. I think. For example, you are suggesting using one beast of a machine to do all of the heavy lifting (radio/ TV data processing) and then send the results (streams) to a smaller animal to be passed on to the CDN.
If that is correct, I once had a setup like that but lost those machines in a partnership dissolution. It was two machines, a red one, and a blue one. I cannot remember the name of the company but we got the hardware and software from them. The playout software was called Gryphon. One machine was an i7 with a DeckLink Studio and the other one was an i5 with a nVidia G-Force. They were connected via Ethernet. That was about 6 years ago. Anyway.
Right now I have two custom-built machines: one is a 3GHz i5 Quad Core with a GT 710 and 8GB of ram, and the other one is a 3.3GHz Xeon Quad Core (with HyperThreading) with a DeckLink Studio and a Quadro 4000, and 16GB of ram. I will look into how these tools can be implemented into our situation.
I see that their information says iVGA is for TriCaster and that the new Pro release includes audio along with the video. Others were saying to use a short 1/8th-inch audio cable when using iVGA.
Our switcher is vMix Pro and I do remember seeing NDI in the settings. Never even thought to look into it. I have to find out will this work for me being that I don’t use a TriCaster.

if your using vMix then its simpler becuse it does NDI and streaming to custom CDN, and theres a new version realesed 16 May with som nice features. So basically you dont need OBS. You can feed the videos to vMix either by NDI or SDI, probably SDI is easier for a beginner with less changing to the servers config-file and you dont have to install Newtek drivers for NDI. Using the CasparCG Server Frontend makes things much easier to configure.

Sorry 2 things. If you are using NDI you have to have a gigabit network and if your using SDI you have to have SDI cards in both machines. I would run vMix in Xeon and Caspar in the i5-machine and probably switch the graphic-cards. In my current production-setup I have vMix running in a Z840 with dual Xeon and Caspar on a Z440 with single Xeon. in the vMix I have a Quad2-card and in Caspar a Duo2.

What I have been doing is running vMix on a ZenBook Pro. I have three HMC80s coming into the ZenBook on knockoff Magewells via usb3 ports. I’ve been passing the signal. What I mean is, for example, I produce an event wherein we ran the HMC80s into the ZenBook out in the field. It was a cookout concert. I connected the cams and then connected vMix to the CDN with my cellphone. I used TeamViewer to disconnect the server then started the broadcast from the concert. That worked better than expected so then I started looking at vMix as a playout solution but it’s not built that way. vMix Support did tell me how to use it to accomplish the playout objective but it’s not time-accurate and it’s resource-greedy when streaming. Sounds like an airport in my small production area when it’s streaming. I was so hoping that vMix was also a playout solution so I could use only one program, but they haven’t developed it like that.
I wonder if someone on here would help me develop something like that…? I’m rusty on VB but it won’t take long to get back up to speed, and when I was a coder my specialization was interfaces. I didn’t pursue it (Computer Science) because my motive for enrolling was to find out/ learn how computers would be used in recording/media environments. Because there were so many coding modules I learned that I have an aptitude and a talent for programming. That was in the mid 90s. As SOON as I graduated I went straight into production studios and built my workstations myself. I did write a piece of software I called Executive Producer but I never released it or anything. It grabbed you by the hand and helped you run a record label. It calculated studio time (took EVERYTHING into consideration as far as expenses like studio gear units’ actual electricity usage and things you entered into about your company), helped with bookings, everything. I began recoding it to change the GUI for public release but I caught a break with the music and didn’t have time for it. That computer was then stolen in break-in and I haven’t put it back together.
I was a better than decent app developer and like I said, GUIs was my thing.
I wonder if someone on here has thought about this…? I wonder if a program like this is feasible as far as keeping the machine resources light as possible yet having the flexibility to stream scheduled file-based content and stream-based live content… Honestly, looking at it, vMix is one step away from this. When UniMedia screwed me with UniPlay, I went to vMix and have been using it to schedule our station. I have exactly 12 hours of media in several playlists and have started them at midnight or noon countless times. These playlists never wrap around on time. Never. I think if someone did a vMix meets @vimlesh1975 's playout program that would REALLY help a lot of us. Having that kind of flexibility in one solution in a studio with plug-in field versions to do live work in the field would be awesome.

I would use a hardware IPTV encoder paired with CasparCG and a front end for this. I have an encoder that I got for $550 that should work great. I will be testing it this weekend. They have HEVC and 4k versions that double and triple the price tag… Dedicated hardware works best for stuff like this, although you can make your own dedicated closed wall type system with the solutions mentioned above.

If it works like expected I will share the make and model. Our old cerevo encoder has way to high latency, so even hardware solutions can have their problems…

Latency was pretty good for going in on a cellphone’s hotspot (wifi). It was about 30 seconds off. The video quality was really good though. It was mostly clean at 1080p/29.97/320M.