Docs

Getting started

1. 1. Match Settings

   Set team names, abbreviations, colours, and logos, plus the venue, kick-off time, and half lengths. This is also where you choose between the football timer and generic periods (for sports that aren’t halves-based, e.g. 4 × 12-minute quarters), and toggle extra time and penalties for the match. Save as club keeps a team’s name, colours, and logo, and Load a saved club fills the home or away slot in one step, so you don’t have to re-enter the same club every week. Whole fixtures can be saved and reloaded too.

2. 2. Window Settings

   Pick your key colour. Whether screens switch automatically when the clock starts and stops is a toggle next to the clock controls on the dashboard. The OBS browser source, keyboard shortcuts, and phone remote live in System Settings, see below.

3. 3. Move the display to your output

   Move the display window to the output monitor and make it fullscreen. PlayOverlay is multi-monitor aware: you can lock windows always-on-top and keep the machine awake for the whole stream.

4. 4. Kick off

   Start the first half, add goals as they happen, add stoppage time, and advance phases. Each goal puts a banner on air automatically and is logged with its minute. At half-time or full-time, open the Goals panel to add scorers (the end screen lists them) or show a banner again; the automatic banner can be switched off there too. If the app closes mid-match, the score, clock, and match state are saved continuously, so you can restore where you left off. Between fixtures, New match clears the match and keeps your team settings.

Chroma key or OBS browser source

There are two ways to get PlayOverlay’s graphics into your stream.

Keyboard shortcuts

While PlayOverlay is focused, these work by default:

The same actions also work system-wide (while OBS or your mixer software is focused) with Alt added, for example Cmd/Ctrl+Alt+Shift+H, unless the shortcut you’ve bound already includes Alt, in which case there’s no separate system-wide variant. Shortcuts are rebindable: open System Settings → Keyboard Shortcuts, click Change next to an action, then press the new key combination (a modifier other than Shift is required). Combinations the app already uses, such as Cmd/Ctrl+Z for undo or Cmd/Ctrl+C for copy, are refused. Reset restores that action’s default.

Stream Deck

Connect an Elgato Stream Deck from System Settings → Connect to Stream Deck. The deck shows rotating button sets for scoring, match phases, and screen switching, and the logo key cycles between sets. PlayOverlay talks to the deck over WebHID, so close any other software that’s holding it, including the official Stream Deck app.

Phone remote (LAN)

Off by default. When you’d rather run the match from the touchline than the laptop, PlayOverlay can serve a small control page to a phone on the same local network (usually the same wifi):

1. Open System Settings → Phone Remote and switch it on (default port 3006).
2. On the phone, connected to the same local network as the laptop, scan the QR code shown there or open http://<laptop-ip>:<port>/.
3. Enter the 6-digit PIN shown in Settings. Once paired, the phone shows the live score, clock, and on-air screen.

From the phone you can add or remove a goal for either team, pause or resume the running clock, advance to the next match phase (which starts each half), and switch which graphic is on air. It mirrors the live match state, so it stays in sync with the operator and any other paired phone: a phone tap and an on-screen click behave identically. While the laptop is offering to restore a match after a crash, the phone’s controls pause until the offer is answered there, so a tap can’t overwrite the recovered score.

Security: while it’s on, the remote server listens on all of the laptop’s network interfaces, so any device that can reach the laptop on your local network can open the page. It isn’t exposed to the internet unless the network forwards that port to the laptop, which venue and home networks don’t do by default. Pairing is gated by a 6-digit PIN that’s regenerated every time you enable the feature (and again on every app restart), and repeated wrong guesses are rate-limited per device, so a misbehaving device can only lock itself out. A paired phone that drops off the wifi reconnects by itself. It’s built for a trusted venue network, not a hostile public one, so leave it off when you don’t need it and treat the PIN like any other password.

Note: the phone remote interface is English-only, regardless of which language you’ve chosen for the operator dashboard.

Languages

The operator dashboard and the on-screen graphics are available in 8 locales: English, French, German, Italian, Spanish (Spain and Latin America), and Portuguese (Portugal and Brazil). On first launch, PlayOverlay suggests a language based on your system and asks you to confirm it or pick another. You can change it any time under System Settings → Language, and it applies to both the operator dashboard and the on-air graphics. Anything you type yourself, team names, abbreviations, venues, and the titles of saved match settings or custom screens, is always shown exactly as you enter it and is never translated.

These translations are machine-generated and haven’t been reviewed by native speakers, so some wording, especially the on-air football terms, may read a little off. If you spot a mistake, please open an issue and it’ll get fixed.