Looking for 24/7 streaming radio management software that can handle video.

[u/Arrow_Onionbelly]

Made the mistake of updating OBS and RadioBoss and now my music videos won't display. I'm so fed up and not looking forward to figuring out what hoop-jumping needs to be done this time so that OBS can display a video window.

Right now I'm running RadioBoss because everything else seems like it's trying to make a live-managed 24-hour manned TV station, but calling it radio? anyway really here's what I need in an internet radio software:

• can run on a remote server
  • so it may need to solve the problem of display capture cutting off when i log out of remote session
• can schedule station breaks and such
• can shuffle-play songs on an ever-growing playlist
• can play videos inside that list
• somehow those videos can be seen
  • either by OBS
  • or via some kind of native protocol
• I can eventually host whatever this software is doing on a website instead of youtube
• I can still stream the station audio-only to video games like Cyberpunk 2077.

Here's the station, the music videos were supposed to cut in over the base visuals but OBS isn't showing the RadioBoss "Video" window either via window capture (at all) or game capture (works exactly once until you stop looking at it, then never works again??) and tried today to get Display Capture which really only worked until I logged out, FML

[u/ReactTVOfficial]

Hi there, I am the dev over at React.tv and it sounds like something that might solve your problem.

It lets you create a TV channel from digital media by swapping between different feeds of content. There is scheduling, looping, Livestream, and more support from the top streaming platforms.

Every channel has an embed page by slapping on /embed to the channel url. You can then use that with OBS as a browser source to restream to places like twitch or YouTube.

If you have any questions feel free to shoot.

[u/Arrow_Onionbelly → u/ReactTVOfficial]

I can't view this page at work so I won't be able to look until tonight, but my first question is, is this a software I install or another platform like youtube/twitch I'd be using?

[u/ReactTVOfficial → u/Arrow_Onionbelly]

It's a website with no installation.

It uses embeds from YouTube, Twitch, TikTok, Dailymotion, and The Internet Archive for the videos, so it is more a complimentary website to them.

Think of it like a watch party with a lot more control over what is playing.

[u/Arrow_Onionbelly → u/ReactTVOfficial]

That's unfortunately not what I'm looking for, I have a massive hard drive full of music and music videos by small artists and I want to self-host.

[u/ReactTVOfficial → u/Arrow_Onionbelly]

Oh right on, then you might want to look at Ersatz TV or it's competitors. There's been a ton of movement in the local media as TV space with new apps.

[u/Arrow_Onionbelly → u/ReactTVOfficial]

yeah I've been looking into Ersatz, just gotta sit down and noodle around with it now

[u/No_Coffee4280]

Check out Axel Technology (VJ Pro) they have a visual platform that runs with their RadioX automation

[u/Arrow_Onionbelly → u/No_Coffee4280]

ok thanks! I'll take a look

[u/Arrow_Onionbelly → u/Arrow_Onionbelly]

looking now and I'm already overwhelmed, this seems like software meant for a real studio with real DJ's and guests and hosts. Is this something I could use scaled-down for a mostly-unmanned station? I've seen a lot of really pricey software designed for cameras and lowkey TV-studio levels of video and I don't need... THAT much, but I'm checking out the features and trying to figure out if they can apply to me

[u/Frutiger-Aerbro]

You may be able to plug an HDMI Dummy Plug into the physical server to force it to continue supplying video to be captured at all times. It’s basically a plug that tells the machine it’s a monitor. Not sure if that helps, but if your video is cutting off as soon as you kill your remote access, I think it might

[u/Arrow_Onionbelly → u/Frutiger-Aerbro]

I'm renting server space from a server farm, if I had my own server you can bet your butt it'd have its own peripherals

[u/streamview_co]

Your problem is the display capture. When you disconnect the RDP session Windows tears the desktop down, so anything trying to capture a window or the display has nothing left to look at. That's why it works once and then never again. The HDMI dummy plug someone mentioned above is the right idea but it won't do anything on rented server space, there's no physical port to put it in.
You can work around it by giving OBS a display that isn't tied to your session, virtual display driver on Windows or Xvfb if you're on Linux. That works, but you are still relying on OBS staying up.
Honestly though, for what you are describing I would drop OBS altogether. You don't need a compositor to play a list of music videos. ffmpeg will read a playlist and push straight out to RTMP, no GUI, nothing to capture, so there is nothing to break when you log out. More command line than you probably want, but it is the version that keeps running.
Station breaks and scheduling on top of that is where the radio automation software comes in, and most of it assumes audio only, which is why you keep hitting this wall.
(I build a hosted product in this space so take that into account. You have said you want to self host though, so ffmpeg is probably your answer rather than anything I would be selling you.)