mot-encoder should accept a URL for a Slideshow input

smallscaledab / small-scale-dab

Code and Issues for Small Scale DAB

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mot-encoder should accept a URL for a Slideshow input #3

Open nickpiggottwork opened 9 years ago

nickpiggottwork commented 9 years ago

mot-encoder allows a Directory (-d) to be provided in which .jpg and .png files can be placed. These files are resized to 320px x 240px and reduced in size to a target size using MagickWand. This behaviour can be overridden using the -R (raw) option.

An option should be added to allow a URL to be submitted mot-encoder, pointing to an HTML document which can be rendered into a 320 x 240px virtual web-view and converted to a PNG image. This would allow for easier authoring and maintenance of Slideshows, including dynamic content creating by scripting such as PHP.

mpbraendli commented 9 years ago

Rendering a HTML document into an image doesn't give a lot of control on the image (alignment, readability of text, making sure text doesn't overflow the image, line breaks, etc.), which makes it difficult to create consistent images.

Suggested alternatives:

Using PHP GD to directly create a PNG that can be fetched by a script over HTTP
Using a tool like the EBU ContentManager http://www.ebulabs.org/wp/?page_id=193 to create dynamic content for slides.

What tools do the programme originators already have to create slides ?

nickpiggottwork commented 9 years ago

A few broadcasters use HTML to hold their slide templates for quite a few reasons:

They can be rendered using existing CMS assets, and can access dynamic data held in the CMS (like news, weather, now playing)
The design can be kept in-line with general CSS/design of the station's on-line/app presence
A web-designer can create them - it doesn't need a software developer to update PHP/Python etc.
They can be rendered at different sizes depending on target display size - this is most relevant when using hybrid radio techniques, where the slide can be pulled over IP, rather than broadcast.

Global Radio and the IRT/ARD (I think) use this technique. @magicbadger can probably give some example URLs.

Rendering from HTML -> PNG isn't too hard. I think @magicbadger or Pete Redhead at Global can probably recommend some libraries to do that with.

mpbraendli commented 9 years ago

I stay a bit skeptic, but I agree that given enough care on the web page design, the idea works. And it's not much effort to implement on the encoder side.

The trivial solution would be to write a script to be run on the encoder machine, that fetches the URL, renders into a PNG or JPEG, and writes it to the right place for the mot-encoder to read it.

Looking forward to hearing about possible approaches.