Create a master and slave stations

[didac]

Hi, I want to create the next scenario:

- One master station with music and general advert slots (commercial breaks). This station make a streaming for slave station
- One slave station connected 24h/7days to master station (to the streaming) but when master have commercial break change this commercial break to "local commercial break" and when finish the break reconnect to master station.

Have PF this feature? I know PF have remote station control but how to fix the delay of streaming for sync breaks?

Thanks!

[radio42]

Even, if ProppFrexx would support it, but I guess you don't want to 'stream' the audio from one PF instance (master) to another PF instance (slave).
This because streaming always added quite some delay, which would prohibit a real synchronious advert scheduling.

Instead I would suggest, that you either 'hardwire' (the classic analog way) your two PF instances or use a virtual audio cable, which offers real low latency.

After that it 'boils' down to starting differnt Overlay Scheduler entries resp. Advert Libraries on the two different instances in sync.

And this can be done via a control-command... 'OVERLAY_CREATE' will do this job:
This command allows you to remotely create and start an overlay.
See the user manual for a full description and optional parameters of this new 'OVERLAY_CREATE' control cpommand.
This might for example be usefull, if you need to start an overlay synchronously on a 2nd machine.
Note, that you might trigger such command also from any overlay entry which starts on your local machine (master).
E.g. concider the following situation:
You have a playout system/machine and multiple streaming machines, which you might want to use to overlay adverts or traffic info based on local content (i.e. the streaming machines) should play different local overlay content. However your DJs/Moderators should be able to fully aware of such playing overlays and may be in full control of the overlay start times etc.
The following setup is possible in such situation:
Setup the overlay scheduler with all appropriate overlay entries as need on the playout machine! As such the overlay player will popup as defined on the playout machine - your moderators might get full control and awareness about this.
As a further simple example you might use the overlay command-type 'Playlist' with the command referencing the playlist file to play, e.g. 'C:\Overlay\test.pfp'.
On your streaming machines you don't setup any overlay scheduler entries, but do also provide the localized content in the same path and folder.
Meaning on these remote machines the content of the 'C:\Overlay\test.pfp' playlist files might be different.
As such the streaming machines are mostly doing nothing (except maybe taking the standard playout audio feed from your playout machine as the primary input signal).

Now...to the new control-command and how you can use it.
On your playout machine you might fire the following control-command from the Overlay's "OnOverlayShown" event:

Code: Select all

EXEC_SEND_TCP ipdns:port|AUTHORIZATION password${CRLF}${CRLF}OVERLAY_CREATE ${overlaycommandtype}|${overlaycommand}${CRLF}${CRLF}

Further fire the following control-command from the Overlay's "OnOverlayPlayed" event:

Code: Select all

EXEC_SEND_TCP ipdns:port|AUTHORIZATION password${CRLF}${CRLF}OVERLAY_DOPLAY ${CRLF}${CRLF}

This sequence will now:
a) create a manual overlay on the remote machine (identified by ipdns and port) when an overlay is started on the local machine using the same starttype and command.
b) actually play the overlay on the remote machine when the overlay also starts to play on the local machine.
In addition you might configure some additional control-commands on the remote machine to e.g. mute the primary input during playback of the overlay. OR you might even add those additional control-commands to the above directly!

This means, that the streaming (remote) machines might 'replicate' the regular program by default (through an input mixer channel which takes the audio signal from the playout system's output). And are triggered to play a certain local overlay exactly at the time when the playout machine is doing so!
Note: this requires the Remote-TCP-Sever to be active on the remote machines as well as signal seperation on the playout machine between the regual program output and the overlay output, which can easily be configured via the flexible routing capabilities of ProppFrexx ONAIR.