ingeborgdot Posted December 11, 2016 Share Posted December 11, 2016 We have our own school TV channel that is broadcast throughout the surrounding area. It has become real popular over the last 3 years. We have a lot of people watching and that is great. The problem for us is that because we have a lot of people watching, they like to know when certain programs are going to be on and I understand that. The problem we have for this is that we have a lot of content and programs and games that may run for 45min, or 90 minutes or even 2 hrs. We have a computer that runs an older program that is totally archaic and that was actually geared for VCR time. It was really made more for a power point type of product. I try to run it on a schedule but it is too time consuming to do so. We run our channel 24/7 and just loop a lot of content to play randomly as much is just student projects and start times are not important. The issue we have is this. Let's say we want to schedule a game for 4pm on Tuesday. The day is not the issue. The issue becomes the time. Let's say a 45 minute program happens to come on at 3:55 and our game is scheduled at 4, that 4 o'clock start time will not happen. It won't start until 4:40. This never used to be an issue with our channel but because it has become so popular people are getting spoiled. So popular after a death of a patron they left his memorial to our network. Is there something out there that is more geared to video and for time schedules. Hardware based? Software based? Does this even make sense? Any advice would be appreciated. Thanks. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
richardash1981 Posted December 11, 2016 Share Posted December 11, 2016 We have our own school TV channel that is broadcast throughout the surrounding area. It has become real popular over the last 3 years. We have a lot of people watching and that is great. The problem for us is that because we have a lot of people watching, they like to know when certain programs are going to be on and I understand that. The problem we have for this is that we have a lot of content and programs and games that may run for 45min, or 90 minutes or even 2 hrs. Is there something out there that is more geared to video and for time schedules. Hardware based? Software based? Does this even make sense? Any advice would be appreciated. Thanks. I think it makes perfectly good sense. Some of your problems seem to come from not having planned the schedule well to start with, and some are from the system you have got. The usual description of what you are doing is "playout" (meaning playing pre-recorded content to air) and "broadcast automation" (the control element), which may help you in searching for options. The reason I say your schedule isn't well planned, is because the usual approach to schedules (at least with the student station I was involved with) was to build the schedule so that one program never cut another off. Instead we aimed to schedule short (i.e. a gap between one program ending and the next one being due out), and then had some arrangement to fill the gaps in. This took two forms:1. a collection of short station idents / trailers which were auto-played by the system to fill short gaps between programs, and in the run up to programs going out.2. a "sustainer" service which was basically a looped PowerPoint (it was actually a custom software stack which allowed slides to be inserted and updated from a web interface whilst the show was live) which automatically went to air when nothing else was scheduled.In my time the sustainer was actually hardware level - it ran on 24/7 on a dedicated PC, and the broadcast feed was switched back and forth between it, playback and live content by a computer-controlled crosspoint mux (the most expensive thing in the system). This approach made it easier to build a clock-time schedule (we also had a bunch of templates to save on effort, where the current episode of series would be inserted as they appeared), by avoiding getting to the point you describe where one program is going out and another was due to start. The web interface for building the schedules was set up to query the video files (on disk) for their length, and then refuse to put them into slots in the schedule where they would over-run. This worked fine unless files were altered after the schedule had been built! There is lots more information on the home-brew system we used on the station wiki, suggest starting from abouthttps://wiki.ystv.co..._and_SchedSeven(it got reincarnated a few times after I left as well, I see!). It looks like the current incarnation (which I can claim no credit at all for) now lives here: https://github.com/YSTV/Tarantula Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
henny Posted December 11, 2016 Share Posted December 11, 2016 Take a look at Caspar CG http://casparcg.com For your playout server there is a number of clients that can do full scheduling with it http://casparcg.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=11&t=2042 You can also feed in live as sdi or over the network Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bruce Posted December 11, 2016 Share Posted December 11, 2016 Have a look at OtsAV-TV. I haven’t used that version, but have used the audio-only version.http://www.otsav.com There’s a free 30 day trial. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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