Given the recent controversies surrounding Discord and the fact that the end user is a product of Twitch, I wonder if there is any “bare bone” solution to stream my gaming session to a friend who’s on Windows. I’d rather that they didn’t have to do anything except clicking on a link or perhaps installing a piece of software but with no need to do any configuration. From their perspective, it should "just work.
On my side
Should I set up a webserver into which I feed an OBS stream? Or can perhaps ffmpeg work as a server on it’s own?
I’m on Arch Linux, playing games on Steam, within dwm within X11.
On my friend’s side
No idea how a windows user is supposed to receive such a video feed.
Edit: text and voice chat, we’re considering Signal for.
Owncast already mentioned, and while it’s good, it doesn’t achieve real-time streaming like discord does. It’s more of a twitch replacement for streamers with an actual audience thanks to it’s ActivityPub support (in that people on stuff like mastodon can “subscribe” to the server).
MatrixRTC is still new and while it’s already being used to provide voice channels in clients like element, cinny and commet, as of now none of them can stream gameplay with audio.
For this I’m currently using Broadcast-box. Self-hostable, but the dev also provides a public instance.
It uses WHIP to stream over WebRTC (OBS is compatible) to achieve less than half second latency. More than fast enough to feel like “real-time” if in a voice-chat with friends. And you can push the video quality past what any platform like youtube, twitch or discord will allow.
Owncast seems to do just fine for real-time streaming here…?
Sweet! Thanks for the recommendations!