Comfy Channel

Comfy Channel is a 24/7 live video broadcast with automatic content selection and overlays using FFMPEG and Python!

This repository comes with some example content and configurations that can be used to set up Comfy Channel.

How to run

Perform the steps outlined in Requirements first!!!

The main program is ComfyChannel.py. The following is an example command:

src/ComfyChannel.py -o "rtmp://localhost/live/stream"

The full list of arguments is as follows:

usage: ComfyChannel.py [-h] [-l] [-o OUTPUT] [-ua UPNEXT_AUDIO_FILE]
                       [-uv UPNEXT_VIDEO_FILE] [-uw UPNEXT_WISDOM_FILE]
                       [-f FONT_FILE] [-p PLAYOUT_FILE]

optional arguments:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  -1, --once            run playout only once
  -o OUTPUT, --output OUTPUT
                        output location (stream url)
  -ua UPNEXT_AUDIO_FILE, --upnext_audio_file UPNEXT_AUDIO_FILE
                        folder for upnext audio files
  -uv UPNEXT_VIDEO_FILE, --upnext_video_file UPNEXT_VIDEO_FILE
                        folder for upnext video files
  -uw UPNEXT_WISDOM_FILE, --upnext_wisdom_file UPNEXT_WISDOM_FILE
                        file for wisdom text
  -f FONT_FILE, --font_file FONT_FILE
                        font file for overlay text
  -p PLAYOUT_FILE, --playout_file PLAYOUT_FILE
                        config file for playout

Docker images

To make things easier, I have created two Docker images for quickly setting up Comfy Channel. Visit the following repositories for instruction on setting up the images:

mvarhola/comfy-channel: https://github.com/mvarhola/comfy-channel-docker

mvarhola/nginx-rtmp: https://hub.docker.com/r/mvarhola/nginx-rtmp/

Requirements

Comfy Channel requires FFMPEG to be compiled with libfreetype and libfdk_aac, which are not included in most distributed ffmpeg packages.

For Mac OS Homebrew users, install homebrew-ffmpeg, which will have the required libraries. To install ffmpeg with all available libraries, run the following command:

brew options ffmpeg

brew install ffmpeg \
--with-chromaprint \
--with-fdk-aac \
--with-fontconfig \
--with-freetype \
--with-frei0r \
--with-game-music-emu \
--with-libass \
--with-libbluray \
--with-libbs2b \
--with-libcaca \
--with-libgsm \
--with-libmodplug \
--with-libsoxr \
--with-libssh \
--with-libvidstab \
--with-libvorbis \
--with-libvpx \
--with-opencore-amr \
--with-openh264 \
--with-openjpeg \
--with-openssl \
--with-opus \
--with-rtmpdump \
--with-rubberband \
--with-sdl2 \
--with-snappy \
--with-speex \
--with-tesseract \
--with-theora \
--with-tools \
--with-two-lame \
--with-wavpack \
--with-webp \
--with-x265 \
--with-xz \
--with-zeromq \
--with-zimg

There are also modules that need to be installed by Python. To do so, run the follwing command:

pip install -r src/requirements.txt

The pymediainfo requires you have the package mediainfo installed on your machine (which it is not by default on Ubuntu 18).

Adding your own files

playout.ini contains the order of blocks that will be played by Comfy Channel. A block is a section of content that will be played from a single folder.

[Block1]
name = "Test Block 1"
folder = videos
files = 2
bump_chance = 0.2

A Block contains the block name, the folder location for the files, the number of files to play, and the chance that a bump will be played after each file.

To add a new block, copy and paste one of the example sections and change the name, folder, files, and bump_chance.

Terminology

Playout: a sequence of blocks that Comfy Channel will play in order. The sequence is defined in playout.ini

Block: a section of content that will be played from a single folder.

Bump: a short video selected from the bumps folder that can include a brief announcement. For examples, check out [bumpworthy].

Upnext: a auto-generated video that gets played in between each block. Shows the upcoming videos, what time they will be played, and a short wisdom text. The video and audio files of the upnext can be different.

Wisdom: Comfy Channel will pick a random line from the wisdom file to insert into the upnext.