bcast-control

A small Apache/PHP web control panel for a one-camera church broadcast setup: start/stop a YouTube live stream, switch between a few fixed "scenes" (live camera, a blank title card, a sacrament-time title card), move a PTZ camera to saved presets or drive it manually, and (optionally) power off/reboot the broadcast computer — all from a phone or tablet on the local network.

The web panel (www/, apache/) doesn't capture or encode video itself — it shells out (via a small, explicit sudo allowlist) to a GStreamer NDI→RTMP relay that does. This repo includes that relay's own original code (relay/) and a set of reliability scripts for running this unattended on a remote, hard-to-physically-access machine (ops/) — see each directory's own README.

The relay backend

A minimal gst-launch-1.0 pipeline that reads an NDI camera feed and pushes straight to YouTube's RTMP ingest — no GUI, no compositor, nothing running that isn't strictly needed. Its scripts, systemd units, and install steps are in relay/ — see relay/README.md. It depends on one piece that genuinely isn't included here (an external, unmodified Rust GStreamer plugin, plus NDI's own proprietary redistributable runtime — both documented, with exact build steps, in relay/README.md).

www/vars-template.php already assumes this backend (the $set_scene/$start_stream/$stop_stream variables call sudo systemctl start/stop ndi-relay.service and a set-scene.sh script) — copy it to vars.php and adjust the paths/IP for your setup.

Install (Debian 13 / trixie)

These steps were worked out and verified on a real Debian 13 install.

1. Base packages

sudo apt update
sudo apt install -y apache2 php libapache2-mod-php \
  openssh-server curl git vim sudo \
  intel-media-va-driver vainfo

(intel-media-va-driver is Debian's name for this — Ubuntu calls it intel-media-va-driver-non-free. Only relevant for hardware-accelerated encode; not required by the relay itself.)

2. GStreamer relay dependencies

sudo apt install -y \
  gstreamer1.0-plugins-base gstreamer1.0-plugins-good \
  gstreamer1.0-plugins-bad gstreamer1.0-plugins-ugly \
  gstreamer1.0-libav gstreamer1.0-tools \
  libgstreamer1.0-dev libgstreamer-plugins-base1.0-dev \
  libgstreamer-plugins-bad1.0-dev \
  meson ninja-build pkg-config cargo rustc

Then follow relay/README.md for the rest (building the external NDI GStreamer plugin, installing the NDI runtime, deploying relay/'s scripts and systemd units).

Also consider ops/README.md — the hardware/gateway watchdogs and boot notification scripts it documents are optional but recommended for any unattended, remotely-managed install like this one.

3. Clone this repo and configure Apache

cd /opt
sudo git clone https://github.com/ryanbcox/bcast-control.git
sudo chown -R broadcast:broadcast /opt/bcast-control   # or whatever user will run things

sudo ln -s /opt/bcast-control/apache/bcast.conf /etc/apache2/sites-available/bcast.conf
sudo a2enmod ssl headers
sudo a2ensite bcast
sudo a2dissite 000-default
sudo systemctl restart apache2

apache/bcast.conf expects <Directory /> Require all granted </Directory> for the document root and a TLS cert at whatever path you set SSLCertificateFile/SSLCertificateKeyFile to — either a real certificate or a self-signed one to get Apache started:

sudo openssl req -x509 -nodes -newkey rsa:2048 \
  -keyout /etc/ssl/private/yourhost.key \
  -out /etc/ssl/private/yourhost.crt -days 365 \
  -subj "/CN=yourhost.example.com"

If you want the panel's own basic-auth login (recommended — the panel has no auth of its own otherwise), add to bcast.conf's <Directory /> block:

AuthType Basic
AuthName "Broadcast Control"
AuthUserFile /etc/apache2/bcast.htpasswd
Require valid-user

sudo htpasswd -bc /etc/apache2/bcast.htpasswd someuser somepassword
sudo chown root:www-data /etc/apache2/bcast.htpasswd && sudo chmod 640 /etc/apache2/bcast.htpasswd

4. Configure the panel itself

cd /opt/bcast-control/www
cp vars-template.php vars.php      # edit: camera IP, sudo command paths
cp config-template.js config.js    # edit: list your camera's presets

Both vars.php and config.js are gitignored — they hold your real camera IP/preset list and are meant to be filled in per install, not committed.

5. sudo allowlist for the web server

Apache (www-data) needs to run a small, specific set of privileged commands (start/stop the stream, switch scenes, reboot/power off). Add an exact-match sudoers file — do not use wildcards or NOPASSWD: ALL:

# /etc/sudoers.d/www-data-bcast  (validate with: visudo -c -f <path>)
www-data ALL=(root) NOPASSWD: /usr/bin/systemctl start ndi-relay.service
www-data ALL=(root) NOPASSWD: /usr/bin/systemctl stop ndi-relay.service
www-data ALL=(root) NOPASSWD: /opt/ndi-relay/bin/set-scene.sh Broadcast
www-data ALL=(root) NOPASSWD: /opt/ndi-relay/bin/set-scene.sh Sacrament
www-data ALL=(root) NOPASSWD: /opt/ndi-relay/bin/set-scene.sh Blank
www-data ALL=(root) NOPASSWD: /opt/ndi-relay/bin/set-night-mode.sh on
www-data ALL=(root) NOPASSWD: /opt/ndi-relay/bin/set-night-mode.sh off
www-data ALL=(root) NOPASSWD: /usr/sbin/poweroff
www-data ALL=(root) NOPASSWD: /usr/sbin/reboot

sudo visudo -c -f /etc/sudoers.d/www-data-bcast && sudo chmod 440 /etc/sudoers.d/www-data-bcast

Camera control API

PTZ movement/presets and camera settings (like night-mode brightness) are driven via the camera's own HTTP CGI API, not anything GStreamer-specific:

http://<camera-ip>/cgi-bin/ptzctrl.cgi?ptzcmd&poscall&<preset>   # recall a preset
http://<camera-ip>/cgi-bin/ptzctrl.cgi?ptzcmd&posset&<preset>    # save current position (destructive!)
http://<camera-ip>/cgi-bin/ptzctrl.cgi?ptzcmd&left&<speed>       # (also right/up/down/zoomin/zoomout/stop)
http://<camera-ip>/cgi-bin/param.cgi?post_image_value&bright&<0-14>

Valid preset numbers are camera-dependent (commonly 0-89 and 100-254 on this family of PTZ cameras) — check your specific camera's CGI docs. There's no "list configured presets" call on most of these cameras; the only way to know what's stored at a preset is to recall it and look.

What's in the web panel

• Scene buttons (live camera / blank / sacrament-time title card)
• Start/stop streaming
• A grid of camera preset buttons (configured in config.js), each with a live thumbnail, a number badge, and a green flash on press
• A collapsible manual PTZ control pad (directional + zoom, both tap for a short nudge and press-and-hold for continuous movement)
• A free-text "go to preset / save preset" box, with a confirmation before saving (saving overwrites whatever was stored there)
• A night-mode toggle (brightens the camera's own image setting, not a software filter, so it needs no stream restart)
• Remote power-off/reboot buttons, gated behind a day-of-month confirmation (both client- and server-side) so it's hard to trigger by accident
• A basic connection-health banner that distinguishes "this browser lost its own network" from "the broadcast computer stopped responding"

See CHANGES.md for the full history of what was added/changed and why.

Ramdisk / cache note

The relay's preview thumbnail is written to tmpfs (/run/...), not disk — on any box with a spinning HDD and limited RAM, a frame written every few seconds forever is real wear on a disk over years of uptime, and a small RAM cache costs nothing on modern RAM sizes.

History

This repo is a fork of evade-ninja/bcast-control, which originally drove OBS Studio + obs-websocket instead of the GStreamer relay above.