How can I insert a live website, social media, chat interface etc. into my scene?

 

irst of all you have to use your browser or chat software to display the website or the interface. Then you have to capture the image of the interface and use it as an overlay or as the content of your virtual screen in your scene.


There are two approaches for capturing the interface.


A) Use another PC or laptop to display the interface, then duplicate its desktop to a secondary HDMI output. Use any HDMI capture device to carry the output into the Aximmetry PC. Then you can use it as a usual input in Aximmetry via the Video Input module.


OR:


B) Use the Aximmetry PC itself to display the browser or chat software then capture its interface from the desktop using the Screen Capture module.


By default the Screen Capture module captures the main monitor desktop. The captured area can be narrowed down using the Area property.


But if you want to capture the window of a specific application (namely your browser or chat software) you have to specify the name of the application in the App Name property. The name either can be a part of the window title text of the app or a part of the executable file name. It’s usually easy to find out, it goes like: chrome, firefox, edge, skype, whatsapp etc., the case does not matter.


 


The module tries to find the application window, then automatically narrows down the captured area to the exact location of the window.

HOWEVER: by default the module captures anything that is in that rectangle on the desktop. Therefore the desired app window must be on the top to be able to captured properly.


Sometimes the Direct property can help: if it’s On the module does not capture the desktop but instead the internal app window buffer directly. It means that the interface is captured properly even if it’s in the background.




BUT SADLY on Windows 10 this method does not work with a number of applications. In this case case you have to turn off Direct and go with the desktop method.


Another property that can help is Keep Topmost. If it’s On Aximmetry turn the application window into a topmost one, meaning that it’s always on the top of all other windows.




Use it carefully: once it is set the application remains at the top until it’s closed.

   Aximmetry

 
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EricWest
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This is a nice feature but feels a bit like a 'hackaround' to the BrowserSource which comes e.g. with free applications like OBS:
https://obsproject.com/wiki/Sources-Guide#:~:text=Browser%20source%20is%20one%20of,video%2C%20and%20even%20audio%20tasks.

Similar to this request:
https://my.aximmetry.com/post/55-chromium-embedded-frameworkcef-integration

In Aximmetry you basically need a second (or third...:-)) monitor to run the application you want to capture.
Also, switching between apps (or webpages in this case) doesn't seem to be straight forward.

We would love to have such functionality to capture dynamically generated content and bring it into the Axim Scene.
WebRTC would be another option, but it's not supported either.

So my clear vote (and feature request...:-)) goes for some sort of 'BrowserSource' like in OBS.

Cheers!

 
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Eifert@Aximmetry
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Hi Eric,

We added browser implementation to our feature requests list. We will consider adding it in future releases.

For switching between web pages while using the Screen Capture module, you could crop out the tab bar of the browser in Aximmetry. This way it doesn't show the opened pages in different browser bars.

Warmest regards,

 
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TwentyStudios
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@Efiert: That’s great news! Please implement it with alpha support and custom CSS,  like OBS does. 

 
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EricWest
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@Eifert That's incredible news indeed! Thanks a lot for your consideration!

 
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EricWest
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Hi @Eifert.

Just thought I could re-heat this request to check if there are any plans on your side to implement Webbrowser rendering with WebRTC etc natively to Axy in the foreseeable future?

We evaluated many different approaches like Vingester or the built-in Webbrowser in Unreal.
The built-in browser plugin however is based on Chrome 59 from 2017 and apparently is short of some features.
Vingester works but is again an external solution requiring a lot of extra work to be controlled from Axy.

Then there are plugins for Unreal  like the 99$ version of webbrowser for video.
https://www.unrealengine.com/marketplace/en-US/product/webbrowser-for-video

We haven't tried that one yet, but it looks promising.

But at the end of the day the coolest thing of all would be to have an Axy-native Webrenderer (plus HTTPS requests, please... :-))

OBS can do it. Axy (as a far more advanced system) should have that functionality as well.

Cheers & all the best.

Eric.





 
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Eifert@Aximmetry
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Hi Eric,

Wouldn't be using OBS a good approach for you? And capture OBS-s input in Aximmetry. If not, why it is?

Nevertheless, we still have this on our feature request list. But don't get your hopes up of it being implemented in the near future.

Warmest regards,

 
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TwentyStudios
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@Eifert: Using OBS would require using a separate computer and NDI to bring it into Aximmetry. NDI isn’t great in OBS, so it’s not a professional solution really. Having an internal web renderer with alpha support would open up endless possibilities of bringing in web based live titles, charts, social media, web polls etc. I can give countless other reasons why it’s a great idea, but if you think about it some more I’m sure you’ll come up with a few yourself. Its really something you should consider moving up the priority list. It’s been a long standing feature request from many users, so it’s not some strange fringe request. 

 
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EricWest
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Instead of OBS we currently evaluate a nice little tool called Vingester.
https://vingester.app/

Seems to be pretty stable, lightweight, outputs NDI directly on the same machine Axy lives on.

But still.... native support in Axy would be grrrrreeeeat! .. :-)

 
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TwentyStudios
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@EricWest: Thanks, that’s a great tip! Still, it seems like a lot of unnecessary wasted resources, encoding and decoding NDI just to get a webpage into Aximmetry.

 
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buffos
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Just to add my voice to this feature request, it would be very important to be able to have web pages in Aximmetry as nodes. The applications are unlimited.

 
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buffos
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By the way, the creator of vdo.ninja (former obs.ninja) has created a wonderful app called electron capture (https://github.com/steveseguin/electroncapture)

You can capture any URL and forward the audio to a virtual cable if you want, which is perfect. You can then set a title for that electron window
and then use screen capture compound to bring it to Aximmetry. So this makes the whole process very easy.

Last but not least there is the social stream capture (by the same author) that complements this one nicely  (https://github.com/steveseguin/social_stream)

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