Controlling BlackMagic VideoHub from Ross Dashboard

Here’s a quick post to share how to control your BlackMagic VideoHub from a Ross Dashboard Custom Panel.

If you have any BlackMagic VideoHub router, it comes with software that allows you to make routing changes over the network. It’s pretty simple and easy to use.

What you may not know is that it can also accept telnet commands by default over port 9990. This means you can control it from a command line, or by sending TCP messages.

Ross Dashboard has a built in function, rosstalk.sendMessage which is designed for sending simple TCP messages. Combine these two things together, and now you can have a button on your own custom panel where you can make a video route easily.

In Dashboard, create a new custom panel, and add a button to that panel.

Under Tasks, click “Add”, and type in this code:

var command = "VIDEO OUTPUT ROUTING:\r\n";

var videoHub_address = "192.168.1.100";

var destination = 5;
var source = 25;

command = command + (destination -1) + " " + (source - 1) + "\r\n\r\n";

rosstalk.sendMessage(videoHub_address, 9990, command, null);

The router operates with zero based indexes, which means if your destination number is 5, for example, the router treats it internally as 4. So, this script just substracts those numbers internally before submitting the command to the router.

Happy routing!