LiveText on a laptop sending titles to TCMini SDI

M

michof_d219

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I work at a high school and one of my duties is live-streaming sporting events. I don't have a budget (yet?) for one of the nicer packages of scoreboard-driven score bug creation (eyes on ScoreHD Pro for next year) so until then, I have to rely on scoreboard data driven by hand, using LiveText.

I have LT vers. 3.24 running on a Windows 10 laptop, and a simple text file that I use to manually update the score. I have NDI 5 tools installed on the laptop, but don't see any obvious connection between which tool to use and how to force LiveText's output over NDI to the TriCaster.

I'm using both NICs on the TC Mini: one goes to a dedicated gigabit POE switch driving my NDI PTZ cameras and PTZ controller, to keep my NDI traffic off my in-house network. The TriCaster's other NIC is connected to the in-house network so I have internet access (to stream to YouTube). The laptop is on that same in-house network because that's where I log into YouTube Studio to monitor, start, and stop the stream.

I launch LiveText, load up the connected text file, choose one of my pages (I have a few to pick from — start-of-game screen, lower-third score, top corner mini score bug, halftime score, etc.) and click LIVE to make that the active screen. So far, so good.

Now... is there a place within LiveText to say "send the LIVE screen out via NDI?" If there is, I haven't found it.

If there isn't, which NDI app is best to run? Screen Capture doesn't work for me. Virtual Input doesn't do anything. I know something must work because — for a brief, shining moment — I actually DID see LiveText appear as an option on my TriCaster and I added it as input #5 on my switcher. It worked. I was able to key it. All was well in the world.

Then I needed to back out of TriCaster software to try to import something, and I lost my NDI connection to LiveText. Ten minutes to game-time, I realized the loss and tried desperately to get the connection back... but was unable. Nothing I ran, no amount of rebooting in a different order or restarting apps, did anything useful for me and I never got LiveText back into my TriCaster.

I'd even be satisfied reproducing my screens on the TriCaster itself if I could figure out how to data-link to the notepad text document on the laptop. I just want to have simple scoreboard bugs for my football coverage.

So if anyone knows the magic formula for getting LiveText to reliably push CG pages to the TriCaster Mini (AE3), I'm all ears.

Thanks in advance.

-- Mike
 

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You don't have to tell LiveText to output NDI, it does that automatically. You do have to put the title you want to see in the Live area (upper right window), whatever you see in that area is what is available via NDI.

You can tell if something is connected by red/green Connected/Disconnect option shown in the upper right corner of the LiveText window.

If you aren't getting any NDI source found from LiveText, something you might want to do is re-install LiveText. During the install there is an NDI option, it should be checked by default, but if that got uncheck it would install using the older 'AirSend' protocol which will not appear for NDI applications.

You can also use NDI Studio Monitor see view the output of LiveText.
 
Good to know there's nothing I need to run outside of LT... I'm not running my TC right now, but I can show you what it looked like on game night - the status is always Disconnected, and aside from that one brief time when the TriCaster actually let me connect to LiveText, it never showed up as something I could assign to any of my inputs. The laptop and TriCaster were both on the same network, both DHCP, and both with viable connections (I could stream out from the TC, and the same laptop running LT was able to connect to YouTube Studio to control the stream).
 

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I think Kane may well be right. LT originated in a pre-NDI era. If you made the wrong selection when installing om an external system, it may not be supplying NDI.
 
TriCasterNoCG.png

So I reconfigured how my laptop is attached, and now I can see it as an input source, as shown here. But nothing ever comes through (notice Input 5 is still black, even though LiveText CG is selected). I've tried sending test patterns from the laotp, and they show up as an option along with the graphics card and the CG, but like the others, even though I can select them, they don't come through.

Tonight is our last football broadcast of the season and I haven't had CG on any of them, aside from manually editing CG pages within TriCaster itself (which sucks when you're live-switching and running multiple PTZ cams by yourself at the same time).

Any new ideas?

- Mike
 
I'd like to see a screengrab from the system you are running Lt on when you're seeing it listed on TC as above. (If it's all correctly configured, as seems likely, this suggests a firewall problem.)
 
My laptop is patched directly into the gigabit switch that all my other NDI devices are on, and that switch stays off our building network. It’s just TriCaster, cams, and laptop.
I just downgraded to NDI 4 on the laptop and it just finished rebooting. Gonna try that in car NDI 5 was too much for LT.
 
Well, it doesn’t look like NDI4 made a difference.
What do you want to see on the laptop?

(ETA: Reinstalled NDI 5 -- still not working.)
 
Last edited:
Final update, 45 minutes to game time:

It's working!

And the culprit appears to have been a bad data cable.
Just kill me now.

Thanks, everyone, for your help!

- MIke
 
....aaaaaand....

gone again.

I had to exit out of switcher to clear off hard drive space and when I went into TC interface again, CG gone and wont come back.
 
One thing to check. LiveText only send out data when you update to a title. If you have a title sitting no output, then connect the TriCaster to it, you might not see a title until you update something on LiveText (which will cause it to send out data again).

One other thing to check is that both the TriCaster and the system running LiveText have their network type configured as 'Private' (or Home/Work), you do not want it set to 'Public', as that can cause data to be blocked by the Window's firewall.

Or if you are using a 3rd party firewall, then trying disabling it to see if it might be blocking the connection.
 
I know the fall season is over, and you're most likely into spring sports by now... but this may be helpful moving forward. We have a similar workflow (Using LiveText and DataLink for scoring), however, we use a spreadsheet to export a csv file with "key = value" pairs to the datalink folder within our session. The key = value pairs are read as the datalink name and it's corresponding info. So we update as needed, it sends info to the tricaster, and the datalink's " %ExampleTitle% " pulls from the tricaster's datalink folder and updates the score. No additional LiveText software needed.

We create all grahics in photoshop, populate live text fields in the Livetext system on the TC MIni, export all titles, and add the %dataLinkTitle% names as needed. An example of our productions are here from basketball this past winter: vimeo.com/showcase/nhhssports-22-23
 
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