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Looking for testers for a race overlay application


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Hi all!

Fellow ChampCar drivers here looking for some assistance with testing an app/platform my partner Claire and I have been building.

 

We've been live streaming our races for a while and have found that most of our viewers (friends and family...) don't run race monitor or race hero themselves so they often message us asking how we're doing, what position we're in etc.  

 

So we decided to build a streaming app/platform that overlays race info from Race Monitor/Race Hero on top of the live stream before sending it to YT/Twitch etc.  We've been working on this for a little while and we're wanting to release it for everyone to freely use soon. We are looking for some 'beta' testers to help us ensure what we've got so far works.  It doesn't require any additional hardware than what you already are using to live stream.

 

To give you an idea of what this looks like, here's one of our test streams with our friends at TWOth Autosport at WGI
https://youtu.be/RmXYZVh9Vro?t=14395


If you have an upcoming race and are willing to test out our overlay app for your in car live stream please DM, or reply here - any help is greatly appreciated!

Cheers,
Erwan and Claire

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18 hours ago, Erwan said:

Hi all!

Fellow ChampCar drivers here looking for some assistance with testing an app/platform my partner Claire and I have been building.

 

We've been live streaming our races for a while and have found that most of our viewers (friends and family...) don't run race monitor or race hero themselves so they often message us asking how we're doing, what position we're in etc.  

 

So we decided to build a streaming app/platform that overlays race info from Race Monitor/Race Hero on top of the live stream before sending it to YT/Twitch etc.  We've been working on this for a little while and we're wanting to release it for everyone to freely use soon. We are looking for some 'beta' testers to help us ensure what we've got so far works.  It doesn't require any additional hardware than what you already are using to live stream.

 

To give you an idea of what this looks like, here's one of our test streams with our friends at TWOth Autosport at WGI
https://youtu.be/RmXYZVh9Vro?t=14395


If you have an upcoming race and are willing to test out our overlay app for your in car live stream please DM, or reply here - any help is greatly appreciated!

Cheers,
Erwan and Claire

Interested. I will likely have our livestream stuff installed in the car I’m in for VIR 24

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Thanks guys!

 

Really appreciate it.  

 

VIR should be no problem for us, we're basically ready to go for a few testers as of now.

 

Just a note, since we received a couple of messages around this - we currently require that you send us the live video via RTMP.  If you're using a Yi, or Go Pro or Osmo3 etc this is pretty standard, if you're using a phone I'm sure there are apps out there that can send the live video to RTMP but I'd have to look into it and see what I can find unless others have recommendations.

 

 

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20 hours ago, Erwan said:

Hi all!

Fellow ChampCar drivers here looking for some assistance with testing an app/platform my partner Claire and I have been building.

 

We've been live streaming our races for a while and have found that most of our viewers (friends and family...) don't run race monitor or race hero themselves so they often message us asking how we're doing, what position we're in etc.  

 

So we decided to build a streaming app/platform that overlays race info from Race Monitor/Race Hero on top of the live stream before sending it to YT/Twitch etc.  We've been working on this for a little while and we're wanting to release it for everyone to freely use soon. We are looking for some 'beta' testers to help us ensure what we've got so far works.  It doesn't require any additional hardware than what you already are using to live stream.

 

To give you an idea of what this looks like, here's one of our test streams with our friends at TWOth Autosport at WGI
https://youtu.be/RmXYZVh9Vro?t=14395


If you have an upcoming race and are willing to test out our overlay app for your in car live stream please DM, or reply here - any help is greatly appreciated!

Cheers,
Erwan and Claire

 

This very cool. We normally live stream our races and are going to High Plains this weekend, but I decided to not live stream there with the questionable coverage. 

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4 hours ago, Mark Krueger said:

 

This very cool. We normally live stream our races and are going to High Plains this weekend, but I decided to not live stream there with the questionable coverage. 

 
Ah too bad!  Who do you guys use for data service?

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2 hours ago, Erwan said:

 
Ah too bad!  Who do you guys use for data service?

 

I've been using daypasswireless.com, but they recently stopped doing business. So not sure what I'll use next.

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  • 2 weeks later...
Posted (edited)

Small update - thanks to Bulldog Racing and MDR Motorsports for testing with us this weekend at VIR!

 

Bulldog Racing ran their stream during the test session today and we already discovered some issues which have now been fixed!

 

- We stream out to YT at 720p, we were receiving a lower resolution from their phone camera so our overlays were not positioned correctly and were blown up.  We fixed this on the fly while they were streaming to confirm it worked and pushed the fix to backend.
 

- We didn't have all the driver country flags set (only US and Canada), we've now uploaded all countries' flags to be displayed correctly.  Also fixed now and should be ready for tomorrow's streams!

 

- We also learned our sign up system sends a confirmation email which is often found in people's junk mail and in some cases people were not receiving them.  We're still investigating.

 

Thanks again for the help!

Edited by Erwan
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Congrats to Bulldog Racing on the 3rd place finish and thank you so much for the help with the stream!  Didn't end up hearing from MDR unfortunately but hopefully they had a good race as well!

 

Things we learned during the race stream:

 

- Once during practice and once or twice during the race our software for some reason told us that we lost the audio channel from the camera and were only receiving video.  We didn't stop the stream, however Youtube won't stream live video with no audio channel at all.  Still not quite sure exactly how this happened if it was really the phone camera that stopped sending the audio momentarily or if our software had a hickup and stopped acknowledging the audio channel.  Will keep looking into this.

 

- A bit tied to the above, there were times when the audio was out of sync - nothing reporting errors on our software but worth looking into in case we're somehow adding a delay or causing out of sync video/audio when we encoded the stream, this was also new to us this weekend - so we'll spend sometime looking into this area.

 

- There was a time when the video was somehow about 12-15mins delayed, usually there is about a 30s delay between real life and when the video is shown but 12-15mins seems extreme.  I'm not sure what to make of this as I don't think we can actually buffer that much data to add this much delay.  May actually be on YT but will report back any findings.

 

Overall, I think things worked fairly well for a 24H race, the phone camera stopped working a few times which triggered our platform to then show the live standings of the class so that its not just a spinning buffering circle, and then as soon as the camera was reset it switched back to the camera view.  This seemed to work well the few times it needed to.

 

Although the phone camera is a bit visually shacky sometimes, it does have a nice feature in that it tries to reconnect if the data drops or our platform had an issue.  Which is something only the Yi 4K does in terms of cameras as far as I've tested. (Gopro and Osmo3 do not attempt to reconnect, so if there is a data hickup you lose camera until you can reset it)

 

So thanks again  @MichaelPal and team, and congrats!

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Im really interested this, but am already running our live stream through my own server to apply an overlay. Concerned about sending the stream through yet another RTMP server, especially with the unique way I am routing the stream on my server. Is there any way of using your service within the OBS scene I am running to display that same data to avoid bouncing the stream around a few places? 

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23 hours ago, freshmaker_phd said:

Im really interested this, but am already running our live stream through my own server to apply an overlay. Concerned about sending the stream through yet another RTMP server, especially with the unique way I am routing the stream on my server. Is there any way of using your service within the OBS scene I am running to display that same data to avoid bouncing the stream around a few places? 

 

Unfortunately, I don't think so.  What is your OBS scene overlaying today?  We could in the future allow for people to create their own scenes but its not something we've looked into at this point.

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  • 2 weeks later...

Hi All, 

 

Has anyone tried live streaming at the Mid-Ohio race track and has feedback on the network coverage?

 

We would love to work with teams on testing the live streaming there in two weeks, reach out if you're interested!

 

Claire

 

Other updates:

- A team streamed from Sonoma Raceway a couple of weeks ago and they had a good stream quality all around the track.

- For anyone who had an issue with signing up on our portal, we found out that the issue was related to an untested browser, using Chrome works, using Firefox does not.

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  • 3 weeks later...

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