Using OpenOffice without a background in a Broadcast environment

Desktop editors
1

Hey everyone,

I’ve been on a search for the ability to output PowerPoint without a background (over SDI or NDI) so I can overlay it on other feeds downstream.

I’m new to Onlyoffice so I’m exploring it to see if it’s any more flexible than standard PowerPoint.

I have coding experience and I see there are plugin support… How open is that? Is OpenOffice open source? Could I roll my own version to add support?

I’m starting my journey here so any help or direction would be appreciated. Thanks!

2

Hello @jayme
Yes, ONLYOFFICE is open-source product. You can find the source code on the GitHub: ONLYOFFICE · GitHub

You are free to send a pull request or change source code to create your own version. However, please bear in mind that we do not provide support for changed source code.

On the other hand, there’re commercial versions of products. I believe this link will help to understand the difference: Compare editions | ONLYOFFICE Docs

If you’re looking for the plugin creation, these links might be useful:

the ability to output PowerPoint without a background (over SDI or NDI)

If it’s possible, please describe the desired scenario as detailed as possible (you can make a scheme or record a videofile). We will try to check if there’re necessary methods to implement it.

3

thanks Alexandre!

hopefully, i can help explain better what i am trying to achieve…

so when you watch the news and you see all the text on the screen that is often generated with software that’s designed to output the graphics without a background and a duplicate output that is just the alpha channel (basically a black and white version that tells the hardware downstream what to get rid of after compositing the graphics on the screen.)

normally they are using something similar to this card in the computer to output the signals over a BNC connector using the SDI protocol.
https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/products/decklink

there’s another way to do this and that’s to output the video signal over NDI which is an IP based video stream, which seems to be the go to for most people now, there’s less hardware involved because its all software based.
https://ndi.video/industries/broadcast-proav/

NOW… I am on a mission to achieve that using PowerPoint (PPTX). currently, every product I’ve seen on the internet will only output a PPTX on a secondary display and if you set the background opacity to 0 it defaults the bg to white… no good!
there is one guy who made a simplified version of what I want to achieve but it doesn’t support animations and such because it just saves the slides as images and then outputs them over NDI. i would post a link to the github project but I’m only allowed to post 2 links at a time… so its on github as “ppt-ndi”

I have gone down the route of rolling my own version of a PPTX player using c++ but I gave up after not really being able to get anywhere with talking to Powerpoint. so I’m here now hoping that someone other than Microsoft will realize this is a good feature set to have.

i hope that helped explain things but feel free to tell me no and ill try again! haha

thanks for all the help.

5

here a link to the github project I mentioned above…

6

Hello @jayme
I think I understand the idea, however some steps in the desired scenario are still unclear for me.
Please correct me if I’m wrong: you have an PPTX file > open the file in the Desktop Editor on a PC > the content of the file (as shown in the Desktop Editor window) is somehow being streamed via NDI (specific app?). Is everything still correct?
And the issue is that background color of slides in the PPTX file is showing incorrectly via NDI, am I right?
If you can make a photo\screenshot\record a videofile, it will help us to figure out the situation.

7

a few things need to happen for this to work using the Desktop Editor

  1. when you set the transparency of the bg slide (or master slide) to 0 it should send nothing. currently it looks like it sends white.
  2. instead of (or in addition to) the PPTX outputting to the second monitor it would need to be sent to an NDI stream. the NDI stream would need to be built into the Desktop Editor. there might be a way to pull the output from one of the premade NDI applications but ideally its a built in feature.

i dont have any videos of this because this is all stuff that doesnt exist yet. I’m here to help make that a reality. :slight_smile:

9

Hello @jayme
It sounds very interesting. We need some time to discuss this request internally. I will contact you as soon as possible.

10

sweet! let me know if its something you want to dive into deeper offline.

11

Dear @jayme
Thank you for your idea!
Unfortunately, we cannot guarantee the implementation of this proposal at the moment. I will keep this thread open in case of new user requests. Perhaps we will review it again in the future.