Play commercials during breaks

Sponsors pay for airtime, and halftime is the natural place to give it to them. ScoreCastr's My Commercials page plays your ad videos straight into OBS, so you don't need a separate playback app. This guide covers connecting Dropbox, loading spots and playlists, adding the output to OBS and running a break.

What you need

• The Pro plan (or Enterprise). On other plans, My Commercials shows a lock in the account menu.
• A Dropbox account.
• Your ads as video files. MP4 is the safest choice, since the videos play in a browser.

Connect Dropbox and sync your ads

1. Click your username at the top right, then My Commercials.
2. Click Connect Dropbox and allow access. You come back to My Commercials.
3. In Dropbox, put your videos in /Apps/ScoreCastr/commercials/. Subfolders inside it are included.
4. Click Sync with Dropbox.

Each ad shows as a card on the Commercials tab with its file name and size. Check the cards rather than the message after a sync, since the count in that message can read 0. Sync again whenever you add or rename files. The trash button removes an ad from My Commercials; it doesn't delete the file from Dropbox, so it comes back on the next sync unless you move the file out of the folder.

Build a playlist

A playlist plays several ads back to back, for a full break.

1. Open the Playlists tab and click New Playlist.
2. Type a Playlist Name and click Next: Select Videos.
3. Tick the ads you want and click Create Playlist.
4. To change the order, click the edit button on the playlist. Drag the videos under Playlist Order, then click Update Playlist.

Add the commercial channels to OBS

At the top of My Commercials, OBS Output Channels shows Channel 1 and Channel 2. Each is its own video output, so you can keep two sets of ads ready.

1. On a channel, click Copy URL. It looks like /obs/commercial/channel1/live/ followed by your account number.
2. In OBS, add a Browser source with that URL, at 1920 x 1080.
3. Put it in its own scene, or on top of your game scene and hidden until the break.

The output is a full-screen video on black, not a transparent graphic, so it covers whatever is under it. Click Open to see the channel in a browser tab. These commercial channels are separate from your graphics' Channel 1 and Channel 2. For OBS basics, see Add your overlay to OBS.

Run a break

1. Before the game, load the break's content: on an ad's card, or on a playlist's card, click Channel 1 (or Channel 2). The channel shows Ready and the first video in its preview. Loading doesn't start playback.
2. When the break starts, click Go to Break in the dashboard's Overlay Visibility panel. The scorebug comes off and the scoreboard goes on. See Show and hide graphics.
3. In OBS, switch to your commercial scene, or show the commercial source.
4. On My Commercials, press play on the channel. The OBS output starts within a couple of seconds.
5. When the ads finish, switch OBS back to the game and click In Break on the dashboard to bring the scorebug back.

The channel's controls are play/pause, stop (back to the start), a progress bar to jump within the ad, and, for a playlist, previous and next. A playlist moves to the next ad when one ends and shows "Playlist Complete" after the last.

Fix common problems

My Commercials asks you to Connect Dropbox again. The Dropbox connection has ended. Connect again; your synced ads and playlists come back. Open the page and sync before each broadcast so you find out early.

"No commercials found." The videos aren't in /Apps/ScoreCastr/commercials/, or they're not a video format such as MP4, MOV or WebM. Move them there and sync again.

OBS shows "No content loaded in Channel 1". Nothing is loaded in that channel. Click Channel 1 on an ad or a playlist.

OBS stays black after you press play. Check the browser source URL matches the channel you loaded, and try an MP4 version of the ad.

Checklist

• Pro plan
• Dropbox connected and ads synced before the game
• Playlist built in the order the sponsors expect
• Channel URL added to OBS at 1920 x 1080, with audio checked
• Break content loaded into the channel
• My Commercials open in its own tab
• Go to Break, play, then back to the game and In Break