PowerPointToOSC

A lightweight .NET core application to send OSC commands based on the content of PowerPoint's slides speaker notes.

I use it to control a lighting rig, itself controlled by DMX, while I present my slides. The USB to DMX interface I use is DMXIS from ENTTEC. Either DMXIS or ShowBuddyActive can be controlled by OSC.

📺 demo 👇 (click to see a 3 min YouTube video)

Use cases

I use PowerPointToOSC to control my lighting rig (or the rig of the venue) while presenting during conferences.

Because OSC is implemented in different solutions, you can use PowerPointToOSC to:

• Control lights, including spots, moving heads, lasers with DMXIS, ShowBuddyActive, GrandMa, ONYX and other compatible light controllers
• Control OBS: change scenes when changing PowerPoint slides (for example from full screen camera to camera with your screen, to full screen desktop)
• Control video effects / VJ from Resolume
• Control Ableton to trigger audio sequences, microphone effects (volume change, echo, robot voice)
• Mix all of the above: control light, sound, video, live streams through PowerPoint!

Usage

• Download the latest version from GitHub
• Extract the zip file in a folder of your choice
• Start PowerPointToOSC.exe
• In the speaker notes of the first slide, configure the OSC host to send OSC commands with the OSCHOST verb, in the form of "IP port":

OSCHOST:127.0.0.1 5678

By default, OSCHOST is set to 127.0.0.1 8000.

• In the speaker notes of any slide, send OSC commands:

Example:

OSC: /dmxis/preset/1
OSC: /test1 i 123.45
OSC: /test2 f 123.45
OSC: /test3 s teststring
OSC: /test4 b true

For DMXIS, refer to this manual for OSC commands. For ShowBuddyActive, refer to this manual.

PowerPointToOSC relies on sendosc command line. The same syntax applies.

TODO

• Support per click OSC commands (see App_SlideShowNextClick) within the same slide
• Remove sendosc.exe dependency and send direct OSC packets leveraging UDP. Spec. Boiler plate code:

        static void SendUdp(int srcPort, string dstIp, int dstPort, byte[] data)
        {
            using (UdpClient c = new UdpClient(srcPort))
                c.Send(data, data.Length, dstIp, dstPort);
        }

        public static void PadNull(List<byte> data)
        {
            byte zero = 0;
            int pad = 4 - (data.Count % 4);
            for (int i = 0; i < pad; i++)
            {
                data.Add(zero);
            }
        }
        
        SendUdp(8000, "127.0.0.1", 8000, Encoding.ASCII.GetBytes(oscString));

Credits

PowerPointToOSC is based on PowerPointToOBSSceneSwitcher which allows to select OBS scenes based on the content of slides speaker notes. With OSC support, PowerPointToOSC is more generic. OBS can be controlled too using the OSC-for-OBS plugin by @jshea2.