I need a method for either accessing the zoomchat data directly... or to add functionality allowing someone to call the last X rows.

I am trying to create a giant running chat window (a vertical 80" display) that our faculty can see while they are teaching... the last 10 or so chats, newest on top.

Currently, Zoomchat is just presented as a datasource. We can access the chats one row at a time, but we can't do anything more because there is no file or accessible source to manipulate by script... as there would be for other datasources xml, google sheets, etc.

For my purposes, I just need a way to get at the data... I can figure something out from there.

But it would be nicer if there were some multi-line data display options in vMix like "display Last X rows" or other filters, sql command or whatever.


(If this is sounding familiar, we talked about it at NAB.)


Thank you!

I've been trying to figure out a way to pull this off too. If I could somehow sort where the last chat comment was instead the 1st line in the data source (instead of the last, as it is now) it would be simple. The problem that I can't work around is that the latest comment appends vs prepends, so it's always a different row number.

Of course I can get the latest one to show up with auto-next, but I can't get the latest 5 or 10 chats to stay up. As I'd need to lock in what rows they were, but that is always changing.

An option to prepend vs append would solve it, or some other kind of persistent sorting option for like time.

That would be really cool. However, I'd be happy if it just held its 'Received' sorting options in Data Sources, so I could have it prepend instead of append new messages.

Then I could display the latest 5 messages by using the rows 1-5.

As it is, I can't do anything but use the auto-next to display the very last message.

This isn't even remotely difficult.

If you have access to scripting, I've literally posted one way to do this in the "Scripting for Dummies" thread.

If you use something external, like Bitfocus Companion, you can do it there just as easily.

I run a Bingo game where I show the last 4 numbers called in a title. This is one step "harder" than that.

https://forums.vmix.com/...g-for-Dummies#post113993



You don't have to be optimistic; you just have to have a vague understanding of what you're doing.

And the Zoom chat data source doesn't behave any differently than any other data source in any meaningful way.

It writes the contents to title fields which are accessible via the API.

I've said multiple times, which should be obvious to anyone without me having to say it, that hidden title fields are a great way to track data in, and outside of, vMix.

You can store whatever you want in them and retrieve it wherever you want. The "whatever" could be literally anything, including the previous X number of Zoom chats and the sender's name, and the "wherever" could be, again, anything, including visible fields on the same or different titles.



I don't know what your previous methods are, nor do I know what "sorting" you could possibly need, beyond "most recent" or "oldest", but if you need them in, say, alphabetical order or sorted by sender, you could achieve that too, it'd just take a bit more work.

I also don't know why you'd need to manipulate the underlying file when you can simply manipulate the data it feeds you before you make it public.



I don't understand why you'd do that instead of just taking the data out of the data source and doing whatever you want with it (which goes for this and any other data source).

I would think that'd be as simple as "looking at what you did & changing it accordingly". Scripts can be annotated. They can also be fairly self-explanatory.

There are also, as I said, tools like Bitfocus Companion that, after recent developments, will do all the heavy lifting for you, if you don't want to do it yourself.

As I stated, this isn't even remotely complicated. It'd take me about 2-3 hours to do. Less if I can just feed everything into a single title field, one after the other.

You can also just feed all the data into a Google Sheet, if, for some reason, you need it to be a Google Sheet. That's more complicated to do with pure vMix than with something that's designed to integrate with both vMix and Google Sheets, but still doable in either case.

You can put the new data on the top, on the bottom, wherever.

Now, to me, taking the data and putting it in a Google Sheet only to take the data out of the Google Sheet and do something with it seems more drawn out and unnecessary to me than simply taking the data and using it, but the option exists for you to do it, and has for some time.

And none of the myriad of options discussed thus far even get into the fact that the Zoom Chat is also available via vMix Social to be queued up however you want.