The text crawler is a scrolling ticker bar — text that moves continuously from right to left across the video frame, like a news ticker. It reads its content from a text file and refreshes that content periodically, so you can update the crawler text while streaming and have the changes appear automatically on your next read cycle.
Like all overlay features, the crawler only applies to RTMP-based streaming targets.
Open the Overlay Editor (Settings › Appearance › Edit Overlay Layout…), scroll down to the Crawler section on the Now Playing tab, and check Enable Crawler.
SignalCaster reads crawler content from Misc/System/crawler.txt inside your Station folder. Put one item of text per line. SignalCaster joins all the lines into a single continuous string separated by a diamond separator (◆) and scrolls the result in a loop. You can update crawler.txt at any time — SignalCaster polls it periodically and picks up changes automatically without any restart required.
Keep individual lines in crawler.txt short and punchy. The crawler is most readable when no single item exceeds about 80 characters. Long lines work fine, but your audience needs time to read as the text scrolls past.
| Control | What it does |
|---|---|
| Enable Crawler | Turns the scrolling ticker on or off. |
| Bar H / V | Position of the crawler bar on the video frame. The bar is typically placed near the bottom edge. |
| Bar Width / Height | The size of the background bar behind the crawling text. |
| Bar Alpha | Opacity of the background bar. 0.7–0.8 is a good balance of legibility and transparency. |
| Font | Typeface for the crawler text. |
| Font Size | Size of the crawler text in points. Because the text needs to be readable while moving, 22–28pt is usually appropriate. |
| Speed | How fast the text scrolls in pixels per frame. Higher values scroll faster. |
| Uppercase | When checked, all crawler text is displayed in capitals regardless of what’s in the file. Classic ticker-tape look. |
The crawler bar sits below the spectrum visualizer when both are enabled. A common layout is: background image filling the frame, spectrum visualizer in the lower portion, and the crawler bar at the very bottom. Leave a few pixels of padding from the bottom edge of the frame so the text doesn’t clip.