VideoHub Smart Control Button Color Feedback

[Nominari]

Is this a feature relevant to companion itself, and not a module?

• I believe this to be a feature for companion, not a module

Is there an existing issue for this?

• I have searched the existing issues

Describe the feature

Change the color of the buttons by feedback or button setting - according to the standard buttons on a Stream Deck.

Usecases

• Preview / Program control (green - PVW, red - PGM) on a vision mixer like ATEM, ROSS or software like vMix.
• grouping buttons by color for different functions
• replicateing the "original" function in order to control a matrix / crosspoint - sources might have different colours than destinations
• use as a shout box - different colours for jingles, sound fx etc.
• use with presets / videoclips etc. - the selected one has another color than the other ones.

The devices are very reliable and of good build quality - and also very affordable compared to a StreamDeck Pro - with constraints but the same 1U rack mountable size. Especially in the event business where basically everybody uses Companion nowadays- a more "sophisticated" implementation of these controls would be a really useful add-on and "reuse" of those devices.

[Julusian]

I don't have access to one of the current models of these, I did the original implementation against the last gen thin pale grey model. But I suspect it will be subject to the same limitations.

The issue I found there is that because this is using the videohub protocol, there is limited options on what we can do for illuminating the buttons. At most we can illuminate (with no colour control) one of the buttons at a time, which would not be useful.

I didn't look into whether we could use the macro support to do anything for this, but I suspect not.

So I personally see the videhub listener as a nice way to reuse any existing videohub panels you have and want to replace with companion, but wouldn't recommend buying them to use with companion.
For better supported rackmount panels, the stream deck studio is a little more expensive and has less buttons but is well supported.
Or the xkeys XKE-40 while only red/blue backlights and is not directly networked, is a lot cheaper and provides a similar number of buttons.

I'm going to leave this open in case someone wants to look into whether I missed anything in the protocol that would allow for improving this

[Julusian]

I have been considering looking into whether it would be possible to make an alternate firmware instead, as the panels clearly have full rgb leds, but this is probably a fair amount of effort that is hard to motivate.
The internals are not all that sophisticated, the cpu and tooling to compile for it should be readily available