Live Video Streaming Server

Software & Operating Systems Linux
1

Hello world.

The title pretty much sums up what I'm looking for, so let me go into some detail.

First, if you have seen some game streams on Twitch with two casters playing on their separate systems and combining both audio and video feeds into a stream, http://www.twitch.tv/oshi7 is one of the streamers that comes to mind, where Fred and Emily play simultaneously and switch between video feeds. They achieve this by taking a HDMI cable from each of their systems which connect to two separate capture cards which are configured in OBS.

I however, have something a little more ambitious in mind. What I'm looking to do is have myself and a friend in Denmark playing and be able to achieve something similar. Of course, the easy part is capturing my audio and video feeds, the challenge, is obtaining his.

Initially, the way I think this can be done best is to setup a VPS running a Linux distribution, with a video ingest (Is this the right term?) server. With this setup, I would have my friend stream to this server as if he was streaming to Twitch, which I could then connect to using a web browser to view and capture his feeds. I remember a while back that Logan had mentioned in an episode of The Tek that this is how Wendall's Audio and Video is streamed to Logan for recording.

Why do I want to do it this way when there are clearly easier alternatives I could go for you ask? Good question.

Of course I could use Google Hangouts or Sk*pe, but I'm looking for something more sophisticated. I want to do something where I will learn along the way, and I have to admit I'm in way over my head, but that's the point.

I have some experience with Linux which goes as far as Mint and Ubuntu, plus Ubuntu server that I used for FTP and TS3 a while back.

So the main thing I need help with is finding an ingest server which will function on Linux, as I am not having much luck finding anything at the moment, the rest I can probably figure out along the way.

I should also mention that free and open source would be the preference, but I would also be willing to look at some paid options.

Peace.

2

https://obsproject.com/forum/resources/how-to-set-up-your-own-private-rtmp-server-using-nginx.50/

You can view the stream in VLC or on a website with a supported media player.

Tip: Host the server yourself on a dedicated box or in a virtual machine, it's a real bandwidth eater and most host have tight bandwidth limits.

3

I might actually have just the project for you. I think nginx can act as an RTMP server, but something like this would be great as an addition to the webGUI I am writing for Linux streaming. I'll try and get some screenshots of my software later, but its just a web frontend for avconv or whatever tool you make a "preset" for. As long as the tool to stream can be manipulated from the command line (I believe avserver will do what you want, but I'm not entirely sure) then we can make it happen.

http://github.com/k4kfh/flowstream

I'll post some screenshots later if you'd like. Hope I can help!

 

4

Gentlemen. You are awesome, thanks for the help.

I'm really surprised that I hadn't come across the first post on the OBS forums, that seems to be exactly what I need

And for K4KFH, that seems really interesting, I'd love to see some screenshots of your brainchild in action.

Cheers.

5

My phone was being dumb and imgur wasn't letting me select a file so I used Tumblr :P

This set of screenshots pretty much shows the entire process of creating a stream. This is still using the first "preset" I developed, it has the potential to be a lot more complex or a lot simpler depending on the preset you use. I was able to stream an MP3 file from the local machine via UDP with this, and it played just fine in VLC.

Hope y'all like it! Let me know if there's any features you wanna see, I'm already working on some things to make it easy to stream to YouTube/Twitch (like, put in the stream URL and press go, that easy) but if there's anything else you wanna see done tell me.

http://linux-networking-and-puns.tumblr.com/post/111353114363/lots-of-screenshots

There's a GitHub link on the Tumblr post too