Hi, I am web developer and also help with the video/audio production for a church. The church was using an all-in-one video production kit call SlingStudio to livestream but their stream was very basics: no graphics/supers at all. I have been trying to help them overhaul their entire video production pipeline and I’ve been looking at affordable solutions for dynamic video overlays etc and I’ve come across CasparCG.
Currently we’re using a video switcher outputting HDMI into an Elgato capture card and then streaming from OBS.
What I would like to do is have intro and outro videos as well as a few overlays with some animation, etc. As a web developer, the fact that you can build dynamic, animated templates with HTML for Caspar is really appealing.
However, so far I have been having lots of problems. I have downloaded the NDI Tools and got the NDI Test Patterns tool to work with OBS just fine, however I have not been able to get CasparCG to appear in OBS as an NDI source. I have tried following a few video and written guides but they all seem years out of date. So first of all I would like help with that if anyone has up to date instructions.
But secondly, I noticed that the website for CasparCG extremely bare and most of the links go to very out of date information. For example, when you click on “Downloads” the most recent build of CasparCG Server is “2.0.7 (Updated: 2014-12-11)”. Yet, after much pain Googling around for help I found out that the latest stable CasparCG actually appears to be 2.3.1 (released December 2020). That’s a huge gap.
Also, there’s no “Docs” or “Getting Started” page on the website, just a Wiki which also appears to be very bare and possibly out of date. So I was wondering if there’s a way I can help update the website?
Hi, yes the project is still in active development. And you are right, that website is not up to date. I even don’t know, who has access to it, probably somebody at SVT.
Everything has moved to GitHub, where you find the code, the builds and the docs. Also here in the forum is a lot of information available. Use the search function.
You should be able to find a post, that explain how to setup Caspar to send NDI.
I used quite alot Caspar with NDI trough OBS and was going pretty well with the old 2.07 but I have not yet tried with the new one.
To make the thing easy use this
Set a channel of the server as NDI (actually did not test it with this one but with the old _Casparfrontend that you find in the section download of casparCG…it should be the same)
Start OBS and then set OBS as the following picture you should be able to see the source named as the pc name where you are running Caspar
It works pretty smoothly. Try the first time to run obs and caspar on the same pc, so you can exclude NDI networking issues given by managed switch, firewalls or bad cablings.
Let me know if still doesn’t work and I will make a check on monday with the new server 2.3.1 and send you more screenshots
Thanks yes, I stumbled across that page since I posted this and have gotten it working. The problem was that it was very hard to find that page and all the video tutorials were out of date and suggesting I use the “Frontend” app to edit the config - for which there is still no option for NDI (only “newtek-ivga”).
I would love to contribute to the website and wiki to better direct newcomers like myself to the property documentation but I don’t know where to begin.
Yes, it’s unfortunate that we can’t put disclaimers on all that old material. The downside of community driven documentation I guess.
The website is kind of in limbo, I believe it’s hosted by SVT but I don’t think anyone there actually carries responsibility for it anymore. The wiki you should just be able to fork on GitHub and send back pull requests with updates.
