Show HN: Lightspeed – subsecond, open source, self hosted stream from OBS • Hacker News Board

Re: Show HN: Lightspeed – subsecond, open source, self hosted stream from OBS

#111

Post by busterarm » Mon, Jan 04, 2021, 4:27 PM UTC

falcolas wrote: post #109

busterarm wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So even if theoretically the most aggressive licenses still allow for commercialization, the practical effect is that commercializing a copyleft codebase won't travel too far on its own as a business plan. Red Hat was acquired for $34 Billion. It really depends on what you're selling and how good your product is. > "don't do copyleft if you want to have any aspirations of commercialization on the software itself as…

Redhat is the exception that proves the rule. How many more companies which relied upon selling services around GPL'ed code have died? Lots.

Canonical and SUSE are still around and have millions in revenue.

Turns out that Linux is a good product that needs a lot of stewardship and support that's worth paying for.

There's also hundreds of thousands of software developers and consultancies offering their services that make use of GPL'd (and other OSS-licensed) code. Probably 90% of this board is selling their services/labor of GPL'd projects. It's been my whole career.

No, what it sounds like is we're talking about people who want to write OSS but also want ownership and exclusive rights to make money off of it. My argument there is pound sand.

Re: Show HN: Lightspeed – subsecond, open source, self hosted stream from OBS

#112

Post by chrisweekly » Mon, Jan 04, 2021, 4:37 PM UTC

ossopite wrote: post #44

morsch wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Awesome! I was looking for something like this when trying to play a local multiplayer game via the Internet in an early lockdown. There are, or were, no good turnkey solutions for this. Twitch and Youtube have 5-10s latency, which is often not good enough. Mixer promised (and presumably delivered) ~1s latency using the FTL protocol you use, but they had a wait list of a couple of days or weeks, and of course now, th…

I've played local multiplayer games over parsec ( https://parsec.app/ ), it works great and is pretty much turnkey

Parsec looks great, but I'd be grateful for metrics (bc who knows what "low-latency" really means).

Re: Show HN: Lightspeed – subsecond, open source, self hosted stream from OBS

#113

Post by j1elo » Mon, Jan 04, 2021, 4:38 PM UTC

busterarm wrote: post #111

falcolas wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Redhat is the exception that proves the rule. How many more companies which relied upon selling services around GPL'ed code have died? Lots.

Canonical and SUSE are still around and have millions in revenue. Turns out that Linux is a good product that needs a lot of stewardship and support that's worth paying for. There's also hundreds of thousands of software developers and consultancies offering their services that make use of GPL'd (and other OSS-licensed) code. Probably 90% of this board is selling their services/labor of GPL'd projects. It's been my w…

Note Canonical was created by an already millionaire. He already managed a Venture Capital at that time, and I assume had other businesses around. fwiw Canonical might as well be all lost money (millions of revenue, but how about profits?).

No idea about Suse.

In any case, even if they are great success examples, these can be counted on the fingers of one hand... so I'd say the sample size is not precisely "enough", not at least to prove a point.

EDIT: (reply to an edited part of the comment)

> what it sounds like is we're talking about people who want to write OSS but also want ownership and exclusive rights to make money off of it

I agree. On the other hand, most of the OSS that exists is created by such people, and what do we prefer? Idealistic but non-existing OSS software? or compromised but existing and useful OSS software? That's the question that I feel is behind all the conversations about this topic.

Re: Show HN: Lightspeed – subsecond, open source, self hosted stream from OBS

#114

Post by busterarm » Mon, Jan 04, 2021, 4:43 PM UTC

j1elo wrote: post #113

busterarm wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Canonical and SUSE are still around and have millions in revenue. Turns out that Linux is a good product that needs a lot of stewardship and support that's worth paying for. There's also hundreds of thousands of software developers and consultancies offering their services that make use of GPL'd (and other OSS-licensed) code. Probably 90% of this board is selling their services/labor of GPL'd projects. It's been my w…

Note Canonical was created by an already millionaire. He already managed a Venture Capital at that time, and I assume had other businesses around. fwiw Canonical might as well be all lost money (millions of revenue, but how about profits?). No idea about Suse. In any case, even if they are great success examples, these can be counted on the fingers of one hand... so I'd say the sample size is not precisely "enough",…

Wealthy people invest in things that are successful, not piss their money away for no reason. Canonical's revenues are around 110 million a year, taking in about a 10% profit margin since 2018 (which tracks with about how long it takes big tech companies to be in the black). SUSE's around 300 million.

You miscategorize Canonical like it's some vanity project. Even vanity projects can be profitable enterprises! Look at Koenigsegg cars! They're literally a millionaire's vanity project that is a profitable enterprise employing hundreds of people.

> I agree. On the other hand, most of the OSS that exists is created by such people, and what do we prefer? Idealistic but non-existing OSS software? or compromised but existing and useful OSS software? That's the question that I feel is behind all the conversations about this topic.

Free software has been around since the 80s, at this point. With or without the GPL. It turns out that there are many, many successful products and businesses that use other OSS licenses. I don't think we're in any danger of people with our skillsets not being able to eat. We're basically all potential millionaires.

The GPL is _not_ the only option available. Heck, Apache is absurdly popular and the bedrock of many enterprises...

Re: Show HN: Lightspeed – subsecond, open source, self hosted stream from OBS

#115

Post by lawl » Mon, Jan 04, 2021, 4:47 PM UTC

This is awesome! I wanted to make something like this too after Mixer shut down and I didn't have good options anymore to stream low latency gameplay to friends. But I was too lazy to do it properly.

I ended up with this hack: https://i.imgur.com/jDeMxly.png

Redirect the "Record" button of obs to make ffmpeg output to an http endpoint, which is a small server that just forwards any bytes it receives to connected consumers. They can then play it back with

    ffplay -fflags nobuffer -flags low_delay -framedrop -strict experimental https://stream.server/lawl

I've found that most of the latency is actually coming from the player. I.e. VLC has way more latency, even if you tell it to not buffer. TCP is a bit of an issue since ffplay doesn't speed up playback when it falls behind, but it mostly works and you can just restart ffplay if you fall behind too far. When it works (good network conditions) it also achieves sub second latency.

Will definitely have to give this a try over my hack.

Re: Show HN: Lightspeed – subsecond, open source, self hosted stream from OBS

#116

Post by GRVYDEV » Mon, Jan 04, 2021, 4:48 PM UTC

dodgepong wrote: post #99

GRVYDEV wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes I am aware however there is a new service called Glimesh that is utilizing FTL so I dont think it is going to disappear tomorrow. Also I have implemented the server side so it does not matter that it is closed.

Sure, but Glimesh are going to be looking at moving away from FTL themselves. See the discussion on this PR: https://github.com/obsproject/obs-studio/pull/3834

Yup I have spoken to them about that as well however that move wont be for a while

Re: Show HN: Lightspeed – subsecond, open source, self hosted stream from OBS

#117

Post by jedberg » Mon, Jan 04, 2021, 4:58 PM UTC

This looks really cool! Maybe we'll switch over our weekly Jackbox games to this.

What is the relationship between viewers and CPU load? I assume it is not linear? And does it do any sort of bandwidth optimization or is the outbound bandwidth stream size times number of users?

In other words, how many viewers do you think a single DO droplet could handle?

Re: Show HN: Lightspeed – subsecond, open source, self hosted stream from OBS

#118

Post by dodgepong » Mon, Jan 04, 2021, 5:04 PM UTC

GRVYDEV wrote: post #116

dodgepong wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but Glimesh are going to be looking at moving away from FTL themselves. See the discussion on this PR: https://github.com/obsproject/obs-studio/pull/3834

Yup I have spoken to them about that as well however that move wont be for a while

Well, I think it's possible FTL will be gone from OBS by the end of 2021 so I guess they need to figure out what they are doing sooner rather than later. There will probably be a post about it on the OBS Github soon.

Re: Show HN: Lightspeed – subsecond, open source, self hosted stream from OBS

#119

Post by slightwinder » Mon, Jan 04, 2021, 5:08 PM UTC

naikrovek wrote: post #73

rapsey wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you need such low latency for live streaming? For the majority of cases 10s latency does not really matter.

Interactivity with viewers. The best streaming experience for both streamer and viewers is when they can interact, and any latency over 500ms or so makes that a true challenge if you're trying to have a conversation where context is important. Being an introvert that doesn't like it when people pay attention to them at all for any reason, I haven't really experienced this, but that's what everyone says.

There is no realtime interaction on stream anyway if you have more than a handful active chatter. And lag is high by default if the streamer is doing more than just chatting, like playing a game, building some stoff or reacting to a video.

So which experince are you talking about?

Re: Show HN: Lightspeed – subsecond, open source, self hosted stream from OBS

#120

Post by craftkiller » Mon, Jan 04, 2021, 5:23 PM UTC

morsch wrote: post #42

GRVYDEV wrote: post #2

Welcome to Project Lightspeed. This is a project that allows anyone to easily deploy their own sub-second latency live-streaming server. In its current state you can stream from OBS [1] and watch that stream back from any desktop browser. This has been a super fun project which has taught me more than any other project I have done. It uses Rust, Go and React and can be deployed fairly easily on a very lightweight ser…

Awesome! I was looking for something like this when trying to play a local multiplayer game via the Internet in an early lockdown. There are, or were, no good turnkey solutions for this. Twitch and Youtube have 5-10s latency, which is often not good enough. Mixer promised (and presumably delivered) ~1s latency using the FTL protocol you use, but they had a wait list of a couple of days or weeks, and of course now, th…

I have a pretty low-latency setup for that but it wasn't completely turnkey. First you set up nginx with the rtmp module[1]. Then you can use OBS to stream your desktop to the RTMP server. I set OBS to send a keyframe every 1 second.

On the client side you have two options:

1. For low-latency game streaming, I would suggest watching through the RTMP stream. The RTMP module for nginx will re-broadcast your RTMP stream to all the clients that connect. I was able to get a latency of around 1 second by watching through:

   ffplay -fflags nobuffer -loglevel verbose rtmp://my-servers-ip-address/live/test

I would expect better latency from a webrtc solution like Lightspeed but 1 second latency is pretty good for only having to install nginx.

2. HLS/Dash. The nginx RTMP module will also expose the video stream as HLS/Dash which is just cutting the stream up into files and serving them over http. Personally I set my segment size to 1 second and my playlist size to 4 seconds. Through this I get approximately a 4-second latency. Not great for competitive multiplayer games like Jackbox but if you're playing something like a world building game with friends then its acceptable. The real benefit to HLS/Dash is you can easily watch it through an html5 web video player or even a chromecast[2].

Bits you can add on top:

- I put my HLS/Dash directories in a tmpfs mount for speed and reduced wear on the drives

- I put the nginx stream module in front of my rtmp module so that it can handle TLS (making it RTMPS)

[1] https://github.com/arut/nginx-rtmp-module

On FreeBSD it was just a checkbox in the nginx port, so the work involved may vary by distro.

[2] I haven't attempted to play the RTMP stream through chromecast so for all I know, that might be supported too. All I've tested so far on chromecast is an HLS stream using the "castnow" CLI program. The Shaka player, which is a web player, will support chromecasting an HLS stream from your browser but I've only tested their demo videos, not my personal streams, and I had to use official google chrome, not chromium, but it worked on both android and linux.