OBS-Cmdctrl

Introduction

A simple application to bind midi events to OBS actions, via obs-websocket.

Built upon Spring Boot and Utilising lanterna for the user interface.

Why?

What for?

• Need a way to control my dedicated stream computer without swapping between them.
• Remote desktop puts strain upon target computer, it's old and rickety, streaming takes a lot out of it.
• Web interfaces that exist for OBS-websocket are all kitchy proof of concepts / customisable.
  • I've long maintained that Web Applications are an oxymoron.
  • They are neither of the web or full applications
  • Any sufficiently large Electron App should have been written in C#
• I have an AKAI MPK Mini Midi controller lying around.
• OBS-Midi is a nice project, but is written in C++ and I've had crashes.
  • Using OBS-Websocket gives us a somewhat stable ABI to attack.
  • Using OBS-Websocket is a network protocol, giving us all the advantages that provides.

What would sastisifice and get me 80% of what I need?

• Simple console user interface, load it up, select a midi device and start listening.
• Create and try out new bindings on the fly, customising actions etc.
• Need to be able to list bindings and what they currently do.
• Later put those bindings into YML so they can be used again at a later date.

Why this way?

• Java may be laughed at by many, but it's a highlevel language that's fairly easy to prototype with.
• Spring boot abstracts away all of the configuration concerns in a way I'm familiar with.
• Good cross platform support unless you try to do anything too fancy.
• Midi support is part of the Standard Library and is solid.

Requirements:

• OBS-Studio with OBS-Websocket plugin install and configured.
• JRE 8+
• Any generic midi device, doing wonky keyboard bindings is not a great idea for a streaming environment.
  • This is why the elagato streamdeck is a thing,
  • Nice polished streamlined package of hardware and software dedicated to macroing.

Project Notes

• OBS-Websocket java libs that are out there are a PITA to use and suck.
  • Use shadowing, high java version requirements, not in any central repo, godawful design etc.
  • So jury rigging it instead, protocol is fairly simple (if ugly), off the shelf websocket client lib is all we need.
  • Maybe extract and cleanup my implementation as a library somewhere down the road?
• This project uses Google java code format 1.6, because I like autoformatters, you should too.

Progress

• Connecting to OBS ✔️
• Authentication Implemented. ✔️
• Reading keys from Midi ✔️

TODO

• Ditch CommandLine interface library for something better, let's have an overall status display and nice interface.
• Implement basic scene changing request
• Basic bind key to scene change via yaml configuration
• Expand to other types of requerst