Screenberry plugin development questions

General Discussion
1

I am working on a plugin to send the current played video name, and timecode to a server.
A few questions about plugins that I am not able to figure out.
I compiled the example plugin that was included inside the SDK and put the DLLs in the folder that the readme told me to, but I couldn’t see or find anything to say it had worked. How do I check if a plugin has been successfully installed?
How do I go about creating inputs for strings and floats (time codes)? Is it as simple as creating a function with these variables as parameters?
The SDK version I have is 3.2, I am assuming this is for Screenberry version 3.2? I am working with version 2.9.5, is there anything special I need to do, or am I being dumb and 3.2 will work with 2.9.5?
Is there a way of downloading a version of Screenberry, sort of like a test environment, where I can test the plugin without having to travel to a dome?

2

Server side plugin adds a node with same name as the plugin (the folder and the DLL file). Right click on the node graph and start entering the plugin node name - it should pop up in search results. You add the node and it will be initialized and processed every frame.
The widget plugin then can be used to create a widget on panel side, when you have plugin node and you double click on it.

There is no timecode parameter type available currently for plugin API, but you can create double parameter and use Timecode to Double node to convert timecode. If you’re talking about Media Player’s hidden output parameters with currrent playing item normalized time, then it’s a simple double parameter.
For each input parameter you do:

  1. In class declaration add member
    SBParameter *mNamePar = nullptr;
  2. In constructor add this parameter to the node:
    mNamePar = mHost->addInputParameter(SBParameter::type_double, “Name”);
  3. In each frame the process() method will be called. You can use parameter value:
    double value = mNamePar->value.doubleValue;
    You can check if it was changed:
    if (mNamePar->changed) {…}

Screenberry Plugin SDK was developed for version 3.1, and then had a breaking change for version 3.2. So you need Screenberry version 3.2 to work with it. I will also work with just released version 3.3.
It may be changed for next release, but the recompilation with new Screenberry SDK headers should be trivial.

You can download screenberry from our web site at www.screenberry.com. Currently there is a 3.2 version available and 3.3 will be available soon. Downloaded version comes with a demo license for 90 days, but plugins works only with Screenberry Pro license.
We changed licensing for version 3.1, so if you want to use plugins for you dome setup - you need to update the server to current 3.2 or 3.3 version and update license on the dongle. Please contact support@frontpictures.com about that.
After update, you will be able to take the dongle from the dome and work on it at home/office during the dome downtime, or you can purchase Screenberry Pro version for 0 outputs, we call it Screenberry Headless License

3

Thanks for the quick response.
This is all very useful, thank you!!