FMS-OBS Integration

[BrandonD-1528]

First, some background. I'm working out details on upgrades to our broadcasting equipment at the Michigan Advanced Robotics Competition this year. I'd like to develop a more advanced audience display to integrate into Open Broadcaster for the web stream (and hopefully displays at the event itself), but I'm going to need some help in order to achieve it.

I'm looking for anyone who has knowledge of FMS to discuss possibilities for hooking into its match data in real-time. I know that the system runs on an MSSQL database and in the worst case I might be able to get the admins to create a read-only user and tie into that. I'm hoping to find out if there are more convenient event-based hooks in the software, however.

I know that custom audience displays are possible - we used one a couple years ago, but it displayed locally and we had to use a scan converter to fetch the video signal from FMS. I want to explore the possibility of expanding upon that with a daemon that will transmit data across the local network, so that hopefully we have an easily customizable display that we can run in HD.

So, if you know anything about this topic, any replies would be greatly appreciated. If this isn't something we can talk about in the open, I'm open to private messages as well.

Please keep in mind that this is all just ideas at this point. If we don't have time to get and test the equipment I'll just fall back to the "legacy" broadcasting setup we have now.

Thanks!