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While reading your comment I was reminded of the much touted key capabilities of the Video Toaster (late 80s), it's character generator and chromakey, used to d

While reading your comment I was reminded of the much touted key capabilities of the Video Toaster (late 80s), it's character generator and chromakey, used to do exactly that: overlaying text on video, for a fraction of the cost of what professional video production cost. And now, 30+ years later, we still don't have an accessible way to do that using modern video tech/protocols, but now it's about rent seeking and licencing rather than technical capability.

jethro_tell 3y ago
That brings back some good memories. I had access to a video toaster setup a couple days a week after school as well as library checkouts of big vhs camera recorders. We'd get a stack of tapes, do the 1 day rental of a camera and record all over the neighborhood, then after school we'd take the tapes in to the studio and mix them together. All dumb shit, but you know we were kids.
wmf 3y ago
There's tons of stuff out there. The ATEM Mini Pro can do keying and a bunch more for $300. In general, audio and video production have never been cheaper or more accessible. There's no conspiracy of The Man keeping people down.
- Jun8 3y ago
  Thanks for the suggestion; however, this is a video production device which aims for different functionality than the broad one I had in mind. The simplest useful app would be: watching a movie together with friends, have them type their comments on their phones and display them on my TV, in a lower third. The chat part is trivial but how to get that from a server to the video stream? Maybe there’s a simple way to do it using a device like the Mini Pro but when I search I do t see it.
  - buffington 3y ago
    While it's not the same as what you're asking for, you could do this pretty easily with a Raspberry Pi. That feels like such an obvious thing to say that I hesitated even saying it, but then I started thinking about how funny it is. A solution to HDMI being so locked down is to buy a $20-ish computer, that does all the things a computer can do, so that we can feed the TV the video stream we want. Over HDMI. Given that it's so easy to circumvent now, I wonder why anyone even bothers with HDMI any more, aside from inertia.
    - iancmceachern 3y ago
      Totally, or one of those hdmi usb capture devices that are similarly cheap
  - iancmceachern 3y ago
    The Atem can definitely do this. There are youtube tutorials on it. You use one of the many apps that can output your text, set it to output the background as green or whatever. Then you can use the Atem to do one video stream inside the other, picture in picture, you can customize the size of the picture in the picture. You can also have ot chroma key out the green (or whatever) from the text app, so it will only display the text, and the background will be the main video stream. Bam.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - kalleboo 3y ago
    > watching a movie together with friends, have them type their comments on their phones and display them on my TV, in a lower third This is what twitch streamers do all day using OBS and twitch chat. Hang out with their followers and watch/react to YouTube videos and read chat comments.
- raxxorraxor 3y ago
  There certainly is a conspiracy of industry players to keep people down. It is well documented and sadly part of our devices.

jethro_tell 3y ago

That brings back some good memories. I had access to a video toaster setup a couple days a week after school as well as library checkouts of big vhs camera recorders. We'd get a stack of tapes, do the 1 day rental of a camera and record all over the neighborhood, then after school we'd take the tapes in to the studio and mix them together. All dumb shit, but you know we were kids.

wmf 3y ago

There's tons of stuff out there. The ATEM Mini Pro can do keying and a bunch more for $300. In general, audio and video production have never been cheaper or more accessible. There's no conspiracy of The Man keeping people down.

Jun8 3y ago
Thanks for the suggestion; however, this is a video production device which aims for different functionality than the broad one I had in mind. The simplest useful app would be: watching a movie together with friends, have them type their comments on their phones and display them on my TV, in a lower third. The chat part is trivial but how to get that from a server to the video stream? Maybe there’s a simple way to do it using a device like the Mini Pro but when I search I do t see it.
- buffington 3y ago
  While it's not the same as what you're asking for, you could do this pretty easily with a Raspberry Pi. That feels like such an obvious thing to say that I hesitated even saying it, but then I started thinking about how funny it is. A solution to HDMI being so locked down is to buy a $20-ish computer, that does all the things a computer can do, so that we can feed the TV the video stream we want. Over HDMI. Given that it's so easy to circumvent now, I wonder why anyone even bothers with HDMI any more, aside from inertia.
  - iancmceachern 3y ago
    Totally, or one of those hdmi usb capture devices that are similarly cheap
- iancmceachern 3y ago
  The Atem can definitely do this. There are youtube tutorials on it. You use one of the many apps that can output your text, set it to output the background as green or whatever. Then you can use the Atem to do one video stream inside the other, picture in picture, you can customize the size of the picture in the picture. You can also have ot chroma key out the green (or whatever) from the text app, so it will only display the text, and the background will be the main video stream. Bam.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- kalleboo 3y ago
  > watching a movie together with friends, have them type their comments on their phones and display them on my TV, in a lower third This is what twitch streamers do all day using OBS and twitch chat. Hang out with their followers and watch/react to YouTube videos and read chat comments.
raxxorraxor 3y ago
There certainly is a conspiracy of industry players to keep people down. It is well documented and sadly part of our devices.