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A comment on Owncast is a self-hosted live video and web chat server. Parent comment

Re:Owncast is a self-hosted live video and web chat server by southerntofu on Tuesday June 21, 2022 @05:40AM (#31822084)
As some other people have pointed out in the thread, P2P delivery is a great use-case for live video distribution. I'm not convinced the discovery latency and overhead from p2p is worth it to distribute simple HTML pages, but for video it's just perfect.

I've heard of single instances of peertube running on a small VPS scaling to hundreds of livestream viewers. The ability to scale "instantly" by leaving a web browser to seed is a plus. I'm not sure how cross-instance redundancy/seeding works with livestreams though.

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Re:Owncast is a self-hosted live video and web chat server by eropple on Tuesday June 21, 2022 @09:59AM (#31824035)
P2P is notionally interesting and I can see some edge cases for it but consistency of edge delivery are considerable and out of the publisher’s control, while the latency problems (which, you-don’t-need-that dismissals aside, are actually what people building stuff in this space care about) seem nearly irreparable by design.

A browser isn’t an option using current technologies; WebRTC doesn’t really scale like this. RTMP/SRT/WebRTC for ingest, HLS or equivalent for consumption. That’s what it’s all built around and expecting other people to donate transit to you isn’t a reliable model for folks who have other options, I think. And most people do have other options.

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