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Show HN: Boltstream – Self-hosted full end-to-end live video streaming platform

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Re: Show HN: Boltstream – Self-hosted full end-to-end live video streaming platform

#21

Post by michaelmarkell »

contrahax wrote: post #19
michaelmarkell wrote: post #18

Maybe I can latch on to this thread to ask a question — has anybody here had any experience with publishing streams from the browser directly, rather than using something like OBS? Current thinking is I could use the MediaRecorder API to capture browser content and then push it to a server for broadcast with a tool like Boltstream. But, I’ve heard some people say it’s a bad idea to try this, and to stick with non-bro…

Streamyard does this, works pretty well but less customization available right now.

Thanks for the tip!

Re: Show HN: Boltstream – Self-hosted full end-to-end live video streaming platform

#22

Post by 2Gkashmiri »

InitEnabler wrote: post #15
2Gkashmiri wrote: post #10

Peertube is getting live streaming capability.... actually you can check it right now on https://live.canard.tube/videos/watch/5e7b916e-c5b5-4996-a97... The p2p part of it is the real nice deal and these guys are actually making something good here.

Yea, I'm looking forward to that feature. If they can implement that with a peer to peer stream that would be great.

P2p is already a thing and is working much better than expected. https://framacolibri.org/uploads/default/original/2X/9/9530f...

Here is some peer watching a stream (in french) and look at the stats.

Re: Show HN: Boltstream – Self-hosted full end-to-end live video streaming platform

#23

Post by bobthebuilders »

michaelmarkell wrote: post #21
contrahax wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Streamyard does this, works pretty well but less customization available right now.

Thanks for the tip!

The main thing is that the browser is more sandboxed and less performant than native, and for video streaming it might matter(particularly GPU wise/dual PC).

Re: Show HN: Boltstream – Self-hosted full end-to-end live video streaming platform

#24

Post by lovehashbrowns »

eli_front wrote: post #16

How secure do you think Twitch (Amazon), Facebook Gaming (Facebook), and Youtube Live (Google) are at the top of the streaming world? We’ve recently seen Mixer (Microsoft) fall, and it feels like the creators are the only thing keeping these platforms great, so what’s stopping a new streaming platform from rising above all the others other than the creator’s fear of losing stability? Why couldn’t a new streaming serv…

There are so many things. First, the network effect. Going from an established platform to a new one means you lose a lot of viewers that aren't going to switch and the potential to gain new ones since the other platform is new.

Secondly, well-established payment methods such as Twitch Prime which provide a lot of revenue for streamers on Twitch.

Third, existing contracts with Twitch.

Fourth, streaming platforms are incredibly expensive to create, maintain, and promote. They will not be profitable for a long, long time, on top of requiring mountains of cash to start.

And finally, users "get used" to a specific platform, e.g. Twitch chat, and it's difficult to break these emotional attachments.

Re: Show HN: Boltstream – Self-hosted full end-to-end live video streaming platform

#25

Post by minot »

codetrotter wrote: post #12
reificator wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I run an adblocker but I'm sympathetic to Twitch's plight here. Or at least I was until they started interrupting streams in the middle of the action with no human input to show ads. When the broadcaster clicks the ad button, it's a good time to run ads. They're probably taking a break anyway, there's nothing critical or even interesting happening, so watching some ads is fine. But randomly interrupting in the middle…

They probably found that people streaming were not clicking the button often enough.

It is amazing how fast these things change. Less than a decade ago when asked about ads and sustainability, the folks at Justin tv said the cost per stream viewer isn’t very high and one ad every hour more than covers all costs. Granted this was before high definition high frame rate became the norm but still...

Re: Show HN: Boltstream – Self-hosted full end-to-end live video streaming platform

#27

Post by spenczar5 »

Cool! Some thoughts from a former Twitch engineer:

- Probably the hardest part of running these things is managing outbound bandwidth costs. You'll need to either limit inbound bitrate or transcode video down to a manageable rate, or else you'll quickly spend a lot of money on shipping 4k video for people.

- Right now, your nginx hosts both do ingest and playback, if I understand it right. You might want to separate the two. It makes maintenance easier, and it lets you scale much better - right now, a single stream probably maxes out on viewership based on the CPU capacity of the single nginx host that is ingesting the stream, transcoding it, and delivering it. If you have multiple nginx hosts which could deliver the already-transcoded stream, you could scale much better.

- Please don't keep using RTMP. RTMP is so stateful that it's pretty hard to manage, it doesn't have a spec, it doesn't have implementations on many devices, and its security is, uh, _weak_. Big players are forced to keep using it because telling their broadcasters to change is hard, but you don't have that problem. You might consider accepting an alternative modern protocol.

- You'll almost certainly need admin and moderation tools soon. Expect lots of pirate streams, as well as some horrific content. You can't run a live streaming platform without admin tools.

- Beware DDoS attacks. This setup looks very, very, very easy to take down, as-is...

Re: Show HN: Boltstream – Self-hosted full end-to-end live video streaming platform

#28

Post by spenczar5 »

VWWHFSfQ wrote: post #3

This is really great. I've seen so many of these "self-hosted live video streaming" sites show up here and this is the first one that show the actual backend code. Usually they're just web frontends to some video streaming website. Questions: -[0] How widely deployed is this stack (specifically nginx rtmp/vod) around the live-streaming industry? -[1] You listed under the Feature that it support "Pay-per-view" and "Pa…

[0] RTMP is common; `nginx-rtmp` is not common in industry to my knowledge. RTMP ingest is a pretty different task from HTTP reverse proxying. Wowza used to be the common software that was used. Twitch moved off of Wowza and wrote their own ingest stack when I worked there.

Re: Show HN: Boltstream – Self-hosted full end-to-end live video streaming platform

#30

Post by spenczar5 »

reificator wrote: post #11
keyle wrote: post #6

It's a chicken and egg problem where there is not much point in building your own whizbang streaming platform and have no one come to it. Twitch is getting increasingly ad-nnoying and you can _ad_ barely _ad_ watch _ad_ it _ad_ an _ad_ ymore. That said that's still where you get the viewers and that's what people will pick. The ad-revenue sharing being the carrot here which will probably mean it's going to be success…

I run an adblocker but I'm sympathetic to Twitch's plight here. Or at least I was until they started interrupting streams in the middle of the action with no human input to show ads. When the broadcaster clicks the ad button, it's a good time to run ads. They're probably taking a break anyway, there's nothing critical or even interesting happening, so watching some ads is fine. But randomly interrupting in the middle…

That's been a feature since the Justin.tv days. Some broadcasters choose to automatically run an ad every 30 minutes, for example. Twitch's broadcaster UI supports this, and has for a very very long time.
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