If folks would like to serve their own live streaming video, I worked on this Docker image for my church which provides a few HLS streams from an incoming RTMP stream:

https://github.com/awakening-church/awakening-nginx-rtmp/tre...

You can hack on this foundation to create your own solution.

Also, you can use Terraform to easily run this on Azure:

https://github.com/awakening-church/live-infrastructure

Or DigitalOcean:

https://github.com/awakening-church/live-infrastructure/tree...

It's fairly cheap, costs about 25 cents an hour on DigitalOcean. Compare to hundreds of dollars for some other live streaming services.

Oh hey! I know you guys! That's really cool to see stuff the Church is doing online to further technology growth and use. Way to go!

I'll definitely keep this in my pocket as we move towards our own live streaming platform. Thanks for sharing!

Sweet! Thanks. I want to keep this kind of thing going. Are you in the Bay Area?

Wow, this is incredibly useful. I'd love to include an option for a self-hosted stream. I looked into setting up a streaming service as well, but decided to just release it with an iframe for the time being.

Thanks for sharing.

Thanks for the kind words! I’m interested in helping smooth out the edges and making it easier to use, so let me know how I can be helpful. Email in profile.

I feel like that with a geographically broad area you're not going to want to host this yourself and MUCH rather use someone's services for VOD/live streaming. Doing CDN and stuff for video seems like a pain. Additionally for live video.

Huge price difference fixed bandwidth cost vs. CDN.

Nah. $.04/GB is practical.

https://www.keycdn.com/pricing

That's still pretty high if we're just considering raw transit costs. The highest rate I would be comfortable paying for a CDN would be $0.015/GB ($0.03/GB in Asia), that's still way above market rates for most IP transit right now.

Much better deal (and probably way better CDN) than AWS provides, but AWS egress rates are suicidally bad, especially for high bandwidth stuff like video. If you're doing any serious streaming, avoid AWS like the plague unless you like livestreaming yourself filing for bankruptcy.

Vs. something like 0.005/GB for Digital Ocean $5 tier. Practical is very situational, but 10x cheaper is 10x cheaper.

Eh, I have done self-hosted Wowza in the past, which makes sense if you have the bandwidth.

You can also get per-hour Wowza AMI EC2 instances, so scale to those when you peak, and fallback to self-hosted for lulls.

How do you get from camera to the incoming RTMP stream part? That's what I'm unclear on.

Open Broadcaster Software (OBS) is very popular with twitch and other streamers.

ffmpeg can do it https://trac.ffmpeg.org/wiki/EncodingForStreamingSites

What kind of upstream bandwidth does that take?

We need roughly around 4 Mbps for 720p. Our internet connection uplink is a bit slow, so we can’t reliably stream full HD.

I just did a side project at work dealing with live streaming, it's actually fairly simple if you understand ffmpeg. You can stream DASH like this:

    ffmpeg -i [...] -codec:v libx264 -profile:v baseline -pix_fmt yuv420p -codec:a aac -tune zerolatency -f dash -window_size 5 /tmp/live/live.mpd

Check out the ffmpeg-formats man page for a list of options you can use with -f dash. Then serve /tmp via nginx and point the reference client [0] at your mpd file. Tada!

You might want to use the nginx RTMP module, too, if you want to receive an RTMP stream from e.g. obs and wang-bang it into DASH.

[0] http://reference.dashif.org/dash.js/v2.6.8/samples/dash-if-r...

I'll write up a more detailed blog post at some point.

I would definitely read that post. I've had bad times in the past with video codecs.

Does Safari support DASH yet? Or, does Chrome support HLS?

Dash.js polyfills it in for unsupported browsers and it works fine, I suggest just using that and not worrying about it.

Safari doesn't support DASH and probably will not.

Chrome does not support HLS.

DASH isn't plug and play. It's an XML representation describing how to ingest media streams using something like Media Source Extensions.

There are a lot of players out there that will do this heavy lifting for you.

Also chiming in with a project I've put together in Swift

https://www.github.com/krad/morsel https://www.github.com/krad/plainview https://www.github.com/krad/pupil

morsel ingests h264 & aac and produces fragmented mp4 files & playlists. plainview reads the playlists and uses MSE in the browser to play them via the web pupil is a WIP server that reads h264 & aac over TCP and passes that data to morsel, then uploads to any s3 compatible storage (AWS, Minio, etc)

The swift stuff works on Linux, iOS, tvOS, etc

edit:

There's also a WIP project called "kubrick" https://github.com/krad/kubrick

It's a simple POP wrapper around AVFoundation that allows for building media processing pipelines.

There's an example in the project for reading video samples and passing them through a series of Metal shaders to produce fun effects.

https://antmedia.io/ and https://www.red5pro.com/ have open source RMTP + WebRTC servers, as well as hosted solutions. Both are compatible with (versions of) https://obsproject.com/ for live desktop capture, so would be a solid basis for building a Twitch competitor.

That is really interesting. I searched for something like this a couple of weeks ago, but wasn't successful.

To be fair, you're not going to get the viewership without using a platform.

I feel like any streaming implementation should be setup you broadcast to put yourself hosted setup, and to twitch/youtube/facebook/et. al. I haven't done any live stream/podcasts, but I think there is already proxy software that does this.