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Ask HN: FFmpeg real-time desktop streaming

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Ask HN: FFmpeg real-time desktop streaming

#1

Post by GabrieleR »

Hello HN, In the university I'm working in, they have asked me to produce a remote desktop stream for students to connect to and watch the professor coding on his desktop. I would like to use FFMPEG with the latest AVI1 capabilities since we have some gpus (it would be great to use them). 'They' would like a native solution (testing me). I'm looking for information where I can learn to do that elegantly.

Thanks HN, much love

Re: Ask HN: FFmpeg real-time desktop streaming

#2

Post by gus_massa »

I'm not sure if this is what you are looking for, but have you tired https://obsproject.com/ Warning: It has too many options, so it takes a while to get the correct configuration. Also, the difference between "Stopped" and "Recording" is too subtle, so I had to modify the layout style to make it foolproof for me.

Re: Ask HN: FFmpeg real-time desktop streaming

#7

Post by somat »

I was able to use fauxstream as a starting point for part of my streaming project.

My experiment was streaming via a ipfs transport layer.

fauxstream is a very thin wrapper around ffmpeg, it proved invaluable in providing a reference command I could iterate off of to get my stream working.

https://github.com/rfht/fauxstream

edit: it is hard to tell what op wants but it could be as simple(hah, the ffmpeg command line terrifies me) as

stream caster: ffmpeg -video_size 1280x720 -f x11grab -i :0 -r 30 -c:v libx264 -vb 3500k -minrate 3500k -maxrate 3500k -bufsize 7000k -preset ultrafast -vf format=yuv420p -g 60 -keyint_min 30 -f flv - | nc -l 1234

stream viewer: nc stream_caster 1234 | ffplay -

Re: Ask HN: FFmpeg real-time desktop streaming

#8

Post by hashworks »

OME [1] is a RTMP server for sub-second WebRTP streaming. Profiles allow for specific encodes if needed. I have a repository hosting an exemplary configuration and a frontend using their player [2].

Another server is SRS [3], but IMO it is more difficult to use, lacks features and the delay is about 1-3s — it requires far less bandwidth though.

[1] https://github.com/AirenSoft/OvenMediaEngine [2] https://github.com/hashworks/simple-ome [3] https://github.com/ossrs/srs

Re: Ask HN: FFmpeg real-time desktop streaming

#9

Post by andrewmackrodt »

I would also recommend OBS as another commentator has mentioned. I believe in both cases you will need an RTSP server to handle multiple client connections.

I looked into a similar ffmpeg solution a couple of months ago and broadcast an libx264 video only stream with ~1 second latency to an rtsp server: https://gist.github.com/andrewmackrodt/88c2233fb9cc4797ada93...

However, I found this solution to be too CPU intensive as I was unsure if/how to instruct x11grab to interact with the GPU directly. Perhaps if I used my nvidia card for encoding it would have been more performant. However, OBS makes this entire process much easier.

Re: Ask HN: FFmpeg real-time desktop streaming

#10

Post by 0x6c6f6c »

I had been doing Twitch streaming seven years ago (so, RTSP, if I recall correctly) with an ffmpeg script I wrote.

https://github.com/tcarrio/ffmpeg-streamcast/blob/master/bas...

Also, seven years, and I eventually ended up moving to OBS instead of diving even further, but that was working at the time.

However, it won't give you any pointers for using AV1, and this is just the streaming source, you'll still need an RTSP server and clients to access them.

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