We mentioned CasparCG earlier this year, it’s a free broadcast play-out server that offers a mature and stable featureset rivaling commercial packages costing many thousands of dollars. Recently they also posted a short case study on how CasparCG was used to play live World Cup graphics, and they even made those templates freely available for testing on your own CasparCG server. Very cool, and a great way to test out the tech.

As we’re not always very “broadcast focused” here at FreshDV, we wanted to talk with one of the guys behind CasparCG and get a deeper understanding of this free playout solution and what features it offers. So we did a short Q&A with Jonas Hummelstrand, which you can read below.

Q1: What is a broadcast play out server?

There are mainly two types of standard broadcast graphics; the pre-rendered videos and the real-time dynamic graphics. Videos need to support embedded alpha channel and audio, and should be able to be called up and played instantly without pre-loading. You also want to be able to play several videos at the same time (”loop this clip in the background and put the spinning logo on top”) and have them output as one composite, and do transitions between them.

The harder part is the dynamic graphics as in “Fetch the latest stock prices and display them as an animated chart.” Thanks to Moore’s law we no longer need water-cooled SGI workstations to play real-time graphics — a pretty cheap PC can output HD resolutions. The same paradigm shift is now happening on the software side — you no longer need specialist software to create dynamic content!

Q2: CasparCG has been being freely available for some time now…but as I do not work in the live broadcast industry, I have no real perspective on this. What would a typical play out server solution cost?

No broadcast company has a price list, but you can expect to pay between $10,000 and $80,000 for a single HD system with hardware licenses, and then you might just get either video playback or only dynamic graphics without pre-rendered video capabilities.

Q3: What is the key advantage of CasparCG being Flash based? That seems like an odd tech to build on.

CasparCG currently uses Flash as the authoring tool for the real-time graphics, as it’s a proven platform with millions of skilled users that also freely share their knowledge and templates. Instead of staring at a blank document, you can use the wealth of the Internet as a stepping stone to get you started, and if you get stuck there’s always someone to ask.

Another cool feature is the power that comes from having logic in the renderer. Normally you have a controller that just tells the renderer what to do next, but with the ability to script the renderer you can create graphics that adapt itself to the other items. Let’s say you have a score board at the bottom of the screen, and you decide to show a name sign. Instead of manually removing the scoreboard before you show the name sign, you can easily create logic that tells the score board to automatically move out of the way or hide as long as the other sign is visible.

Q4: How does CasparCG’s approach compare to other proprietary playout server solutions currently on the market?

We play a large number of video codecs and resolutions to a large number of output video cards. The dynamic graphics is created in an ever-evolving platform where millions of users (rather than 200 clients in graphics departments in TV stations) fuel development and innovation. By using standard components for both software and hardware, we get to ride along the speeding train of development, rather than being left at the mercy of a single vendor’s schedule.

Q5: If CasparCG is so good, then why are you releasing it free and opening up the source? Do you intend to keep developing and bug-squashing on the source?

We are a license-funded broadcaster that developed CasparCG in-house to meet our needs. We broadcast over 70 hours of television per day, and each hour of programming is using CasparCG graphics in everything from the station logos and channel branding to lower-thirds and game show graphics. We will continue to develop the CasparCG system so it fits our productions, but we are excited to see what the community can bring in terms of new features that we haven’t even thought of!

Q6: Is CasparCG a turnkey type install, or will users need to dig into the code to make it work? Are there hardware limitations, or is it fairly hardware agnostic?

All you need to get started in 5 minutes are available on www.casparcg.com. It’s important to me as a designer that installers, templates and examples quickly give you a glimpse of what you can do. You shouldn’t have to read a wiki or (oh, the horror) have to compile something to see the potential of CasparCG! The source code is there if you have the skills to modify CasparCG, but if C++ isn’t your thing you can just use the installers and don’t bother with the low-level stuff.

We currently support output to computer monitor (either windowed or fullscreen with OpenGL scaling) and to all the SDI, HD-SDI and HDMI cards from Bluefish Technologies and BlackMagic Design (DeckLink,) starting at $199.

Q7: You state in your FAQ that CasparCG’s capabilities are largely dependent on hardware power. Are there rules of thumb when spec’ing out hardware for a CasparCG system, and do you provide recommendations for users based on a certain framerate or resolution baseline requirement?

We still use machines that we built for the first version of CasparCG back in 2005, and they play and transition between PAL SD videos just fine, so we try to encourage people to try it on older systems! However, our newer systems are all Dell R5400 with 8 processors, 8 GB of RAM and a really fast disk array, coupled with one or several Bluefish Epoch HD cards. The support for the DeckLink cards was just released, so we don’t have any systems like that yet (even though we’re looking forward to test if we can build a stand-alone HD broadcast graphics server in a laptop with their UltraStudio Pro card!)

In summary, the broadcast business is so used to only having expensive and proprietary systems to choose from, that it’s hard to get people to think there are any alternatives to the established players. It’s really a question of just adding 2 and 2 together; you can play fullscreen video and dynamic graphics on any computer nowadays, coupled with really cheap SDI and HDMI output cards. All that is needed is a way of controlling the play out and you’ve got yourself a broadcast graphics solution! CasparCG is that affordable solution.

Thanks to Jonas for making the time for this Q&A. You can learn more about CasparCG at www.casparcg.com