Driver face cams, without a call in the background
A face cam is the difference between a timing screen and a broadcast. PONNE gets them on air through VDO.Ninja — a free browser tool that sends one person's camera to one address, with no account, no install, and no meeting room for anybody to wander into.
Each driver does a thirty-second setup once. You never touch their machine.
What a driver does
Send them this, once, and nothing else:
- Open https://vdo.ninja/?push=YOURNAME in Chrome or Edge — replacing
YOURNAMEwith something short, unique and boring:mika,car11,aino-gt3. That word is their id. - Allow the camera when the browser asks.
- Leave the tab open, minimised, for the whole race.
That is the entire driver-side setup. The tab shows their own camera and nothing else — no chat, no other drivers, nothing to click by accident.
The id is the only thing you need back from them. Not a link, not a password: the word.
What you do
In PONNE Studio → Drivers & Cars, find the car number and paste the id into VDO.Ninja id. It saves as you type; the field flashes *Saved ✓*.
That is it. The lower third, the driver cam source and the caster graphics all pull from the same media kit, so one paste covers every graphic that can show a face.
Where the faces appear
| Where | What it shows |
|---|---|
| Lower third | the driver's live cam, or their photo if they have no cam |
driver-cam.html |
a full source that follows the on-air car by itself |
| Casters graphic | the commentary team, from the same pipeline |
The driver cam source is worth adding as its own OBS browser source if you want the face somewhere fixed on screen: http://localhost:4600/driver-cam.html, sized to the box you want it in. It follows every cut with no extra work.
Choosing an id that will not bite you
- Unique across the league. Two drivers on
mikewill fight over the same stream, and the loser goes black. - Lower case, no spaces, no punctuation.
car-11is fine;Car 11!is asking for trouble. - Boring. The id shows up in URLs. Nobody needs a driver's real name in one.
Common snags
The face is black on air. Their tab is closed, their machine is asleep, or the browser lost the camera. Ask them to reload the push link — it reconnects by itself within a couple of seconds.
It works in the Studio and not in OBS. Both read the same media kit, so this is almost always the wrong id in the wrong car number: check the pairing in Drivers & Cars against what the driver actually typed.
Their camera is the wrong one. VDO.Ninja picks a camera at random on a laptop with two. Send them https://vdo.ninja/?push=THEIRID&device=1 to pick the other one, or have them choose it from the tab's own settings.
The picture is soft. Add &quality=2 to their push link for a sharper stream, if their upload can carry it. Do not do this for every driver by default — twenty sharp streams is a lot of somebody's broadband.
Audio. PONNE does not take audio from a face cam. Driver comms belong in Discord or TeamSpeak where the drivers already are, and a face cam that carries voice is a face cam that carries every sigh in their room onto your broadcast.
A photo is a perfectly good answer
Not every driver will set this up, and a race night is a bad time to chase one. Upload a photo per car number in the same panel, and every graphic falls back to it. A grid of clean portraits looks deliberate; a grid with two black rectangles in it does not.