FOHMedia Released as Open Source!

[Linux FOH]

I am happy to announce that FOHMedia is released as open source under the GPLv3 license.

It's still very early in development with respect to the goals of the project. I don't even have a version for this yet. It is definitely Beta. One might even call this Alpha. It can be tested for non-production with small, non-SDI systems as it is. It probably could work for a simple service with systems that have multiple HDMI displays available to the OS. I use it for lyrics practice on a system with three displays (application-control, audience-display, and stage-display) and it works solid. It's especially useful to me to simulate the latency I experience in the high-end SDI/video-switcher/LED-wall systems I volunteer with. This is done with a setting called Practice Delay in the Settings view.

Here are some things it supports (I will be adding this kind of content and more to the Gitlab Wiki eventually):

Presentation Control

The user interface and options are designed for fast service bring-up. Keyboard shortcuts are still needed, but the workflow has been optimized by using the interface for real service practice. In addition to standard presentation control, you can have a small monitor view for all displays or choose to not show them. Timers control is also next to slide control using three view states: minimal, control, and edit. There is also support for controlling the size of the slide cards with a zoom slider. Next to that is an option to control whether the layout background shows on the slide cards or not.

Multiple Screen Support

FOHMedia supports setting up multiple screens, which can be associated with a specific hardware display. The operator can set the hardware display and set it to full screen, so that when they enable presentation mode, the surfaces will go to the proper display immediately. If not associated, the screens comes up as individual windows that can be resized, moved, full-screened, or closed. A default audience screen and a stage display are setup by default. Making fast edits to slides in an edit mode while presenting is also supported. It will hang on the currently presented slide while you make changes to any slide. Data is saved to underlying files automatically and in real time.

Custom Screen Layout

Layouts are a way to define a canvas, set the background color or background image, arrange and decorate text from slides, arrange and decorate text from data objects such as timers and lyrics component elements. These Layouts can be associated with a specific screen.

Custom Timers

You can add any number of timers of three types: countdown to a time, countdown timer, and clock. These can be controlled from the main view and they can also be added to Layouts to be seen on displays.

Media Support

In addition to a fixed background image for a layout, you can also add a background video for a specific lyrics item. There is a Media view to add images and videos that can be selected from a media dialog when choosing backgrounds images and lyrics background videos.

Lyrics and Arrangement Editing

The Lyrics view allows you to paste in lyrics text, adding song component names in square brackets above. A blank line denotes a new slide. Sequential lines denote lines that are on the same slide. The editor has a few simple tools to thrown in some common useful song component entities as well as clean out unwanted characters from the text. Saving triggers the UI to create the graphical rendering of the song components, default arrangement, and preview slides. You can add multiple named arrangement and manipulate them with smooth and natural drag-and-drop actions. In addition to adding your own lyrics manually, there is also support to import ProPresenter 7 files, which converts them into the native format, which is JSON-based.

Settings

You can set the colors for song component types. You can set a simulation practice delay, There also support for a global slide transition type and timing. Settings also has the option to disable hardware video decoding, which was necessary at some point on one test system, but I think that may no longer be valid. Lastly, you can disable the splash screen if you find it obnoxious.  

Responsive Accelerated UI 

FOHMedia is based on Qt 6.10 QML that has fast and smooth hardware acceleration for animations and movement. This works excellent across Linux, Windows, and MacOS.

Packaging for Linux, Windows, and MacOS

While this is a part of an initiative for live production software on Linux, first-class support for Windows and MacOS is built-in. The application runs excellent on all three operating systems.

I hope you enjoy trying it out and I look forward to any feedback.

--Stephen