Plenty of stations now run a camera in the studio and stream the result. Once you do that, "radio" includes video content — music videos, sponsor idents, station promos.
The wrong way to solve this is a second application, because then you have two timelines to keep in sync and two things that can stop.
Formats and handling
Supported video formats are MP4, M4V, MOV, MPG, MPEG, MP2, AVI, WMV, MKV and WEBM. Video renders in the main video panel while audio stays synchronised with the broadcast audio pipeline — the same decks, the same normalization, the same metering.
That last point is what makes it useful. A music video's audio is normalised and metered exactly like an audio file, so it does not arrive 6 dB louder than the song before it.
A panel that detaches
The video panel lives in the main window but detaches into a floating, resizable window and reattaches with a button. In a studio with two or three screens, video usually belongs on a different one from the playlist.
The idle equalizer
With no clip loaded, the panel renders a spectrum equalizer driven by the same audio tap that feeds the VU meters. It is configurable in ways that suggest it is meant to be looked at:
- Bar count — 12 by default, up to 100.
- Frequency span — 40 Hz to 16 kHz by default, with bands log-spaced across the range.
- Floor — -60 dB by default, independent of the VU meter floor.
Each bar is coloured by its own level, green through red as it rises.
Changing it live without a glitch
One implementation detail worth admiring. Changing the bar count or frequency range rebuilds the entire band-pass filter bank — and that bank sits in the audio read path.
The rebuilt set is swapped atomically, so the range can change while audio is playing without a dropout. Adjusting a visualisation should never be capable of interrupting the broadcast, and here it structurally cannot.