I am curious and looking for ideas or recommendations on how to accomplish live streaming to a self hosted server from anywhere.
I know the appeal to live streaming is live reactions from a community, like twitch or Facebook or whatever. But what I’d like is private live streaming to friends and family, automatically saving this footage to my own server for historical reasons. Quality and bandwidth isn’t limited to some subscription.
It’s maybe a niche thing to self host, but if any of you have ideas on how this could be done, or recommendations on solutions that already exist, I’d be very appreciative.
Peertube supports livestreams with multi ABR live transcoding, and ended lives can be saved as VODs on the platform.
It’s also part of the fediverse. :)
The number one google result is Owncast.
Looks like it doesn’t save the video by default but there are workarounds to record it.
I’ve contributed a bit to owncast, and I think this is the right answer. It’s what fedi tv uses: https://theindiebeat.fm/
I have a owncast container setup, I’ve used it a few times. It combines a customizable webpage with the stream, kinda-sorta like a twitch page. Hook obs to it and you’re off. Took me a couple hours to get everything set.
My only complaint is that the stream will fall behind - not sure if obs or oc is to blame. Perhaps my nas being underpowered, though I was testing/watching with ‘source’ so it shouldn’t be transcoding. After an hour or two I can, watching my own stream, see it’s fallen back by like a minute. If I remember right it continues linearly, so more time = more discrepancy.
It’s nice though, so I haven’t bothered to try other solutions. I should re-test and see if it’s been fixed…
Maybe overkill, but Peertube can definitely do that well.
You can share screen and camera on Jitsi Meet, which is a video-conferencing app. Not sure if there is any recording function built-in but you could just record everything with OBS.
I’ve used PeerTube for streaming personally, it works well. I haven’t used OwnCast, but I’ve been on OwnCast streams, and it also seems to work well. PT also has the benefit of being fedi, but that’s only if you want it, OwnCast just has a central website it posts all of the streams to I think? At least all of them that want to be there
I use MediaMTX. You can stream to it with whatever (I use OBS). You could even publish it to a website behind an iframe.
Need more details here:
- What’s your bandwidth and delivery medium like?
- What are your edge/router specs?
- What hardware would you be hosting this on?
- What format are you expecting to stream (audio and video formats)?
- Related to #5, what hardware would you streaming from?
OBS and Owncast should allow you to do this for the most part, but it’s heavily dependent on all of the above.
node-media-server is what I use, it does the job well. I haven’t tried the recording bit, I just stream my desktop to my buddies sometimes. I had to modify the version I was using because the authentication didn’t work well with OBS. This was a while ago and development seems to be semi-active but I have no idea where it’s at.
private live streaming to friends and family
‘friends and family’ you say… /s LOL
