Owncast is a free and open source live video and web chat server for use with existing popular broadcasting software.
Basically it’s Twitch, or any streaming platform such as YouTube Gaming or whatever it’s called now, that you can run on your own hardware. Control your platform and your content where you make the rules as to what you can/can’t do.
There’s a growing community and you can find folks streaming all kinds of things in the directory:
https://directory.owncast.online/
I know some folks think it’s not possible to run something like that as it’d require tons of PC resources, but I’ve run an Owncast Stream with 70+ active open connections to the server on a $8/month VPS.
The install can be as simple as a VPS that will spin up an Owncast instance for you, or as “difficult” as pulling the Owncast script and running it and it just automatically sets everything up. It’s probably the easiest software installation I’ve done in a long time and I’ve been in IT for 15 years.
I also run the [email protected] community so if anyone has any questions please don’t hesitate to poke me there or Matrix or come check out a stream, I’m usually hanging out on someone’s stream somewhere. :-D Or don’t hesitate to ping me on any one of the platforms in my bio.
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That’s cool and all, but who exactly is gonna watch it? Like it’s a fine idea, but there’s literately no point.
Over COVID, we started a bad/cult movie night that I streamed over Discord. Streaming via Twitch/Youtube would get copyright struck immediately. Streaming over Discord worked, but you have no real control over stream quality, and often the stream quality is based on the person with the worst connection. You also are locked to 30/60 FPS, which sometimes causes small frame weirdness when most movies are at 24.
An easy, self hosted solution is exactly what I wanted at the time. I played with setting up a streaming server but it ended up being too much of a headache at the time.
There’s a ton of valid reasons to self host. Just because you can’t think of any doesn’t mean it’s pointless.
Not to mention the bandwidth costs… yeesh
I don’t want to stream on Twitch, YouTube, or Kick. My audience is my group of close friends on discord. I’d rather not use the big platforms for multiple reasons. The main one being these platforms see everyone as numbers and have moved away from pretending to be customer focused and are all bottom line focused to a fault now.
So owncast. Quick webhook call to the discord servers announcing the stream started and people can watch me fail on League of Legends.
Side note, realize I said big platforms and discord is still in use. Moving friends off of discord is its own challenge. But I’ve been working on that.
Why… not just stream on discord? You’re already using it. This honestly seems like a lot of extra work for very little pay off.
Discord’s video quality is pretty mediocre. If you’ve already got a home server somewhere and a decent internet connection, streaming 1080p or higher over this probably works better than streaming over Discord.
You can buy Discord premium or whatever it’s called, but that’s priced high enough that a home server electricity bill or even a VPS with pretty decent specs can be had for the same price.
As for why you’d go through the effort: same reason Linux users don’t run Windows, because they like the philosophy or because they want the control over their stuff.
Edit: also, streaming games from Linux through Discord still doesn’t support sound. I work around this by using Pipewire’s ability to re-route game output into the microphone input stream for voice chat, but that’s just a stupid workaround for Discord’s bad service.
Also, if you want to stream to multiple discord servers there is not an easy way to do that. I have multiple friend groups and they don’t really mix. This is easier and it lets me fully use OBS without weird webcam integration from OBS to Discord.
It’s weird to me that people on Lemmy are asking “why not just use <for-profit platform at some level of enshitification> instead?”
What I’ve seen on science creators on YouTube is that they’d still maintain a presence on yt but recruit people to watch extra/premium content on their other platform, one that allows them to keep more of the money they make.
Sometimes it’s a subscription service where the user doesn’t need to see ads and promos. Sometimes there’ll be content aware ads and it’s free, but the revenue goes straight to the creator.
It seems to be a viable business model.
What do you mean? People watch twitch, why would this be any different?
Organic growth is kinda hard without any market presence.
Because no one knows it exists lmao
Exactly. People stream all sorts of things. I’ve seen tabletop wargamers doing it in the local hobby store, podcasters who send out links, virtual family get-togethers, etc. It’s awesome having non-corporate alternatives for people who want them. Not everything is meant to be widest audience possible.
And they find that because twitch is one of the biggest sites on the internet and has okay-good discoverability. And even then, it is generally weeks (if not months) of effort to get to the O(10) concurrents, let alone O(100) where it starts being profitable on time alone… let alone hosting.
Versus some random website on a meme domain that nobody will ever find.
Its the same with peertube and the like: The use case for individuals is near zero and it mostly exists as something to fuel sites like Nebula or floatplane that are trying to build their own services.
People stream for fun, not just for money. If you start streaming with the intention of it becoming a career, you are doing it wrong.
Encouraging the use of alternative sites is the only way alternative sites grow, dismissing them because ‘X site is already bigger, so theres no point’ is supporting the “monopoly” problem.
Did you know, we used to visits hundreds of sites on the internet, it’s only the last 10-15 years that corporations have managed to consolodate it.
And you do know that there is a very big difference between hosting a text based site on tripod, an image heavy site, and a video site, right?
The reason The Old Internet died out is largely because of the middle. When you have zero revenue (because everyone runs an ad blocker) but people are shitting on you because your screenshots are only 640x480 instead of (oh dear god) 1080p? You start looking at aggregation sites that will pay that hosting fee for you. Hence, social media.
And then you have video. Even short clips could make your hosting bill explode. And sites like Rooster Teeth that pretty much existed solely on their ability to host a five minute video every week were basically constantly in a mess. This is why sites like Giant Bomb ended up starting with Mysterious Investors and ended up getting bought out.
Because you know what is also not good for “the ‘monopoly’ problem”? A site getting hugged to death the moment it is even mentioned on a low traffic subreddit/community. Which is what happens when people host their own video heavy sites. Which lead to adding advertisements and getting sponsored which leads to all the people saying they are an evil site and should burn in hell and here, let’s re-upload all their content to youtube or liveleak or whatever.
Even if you feel that no true art can come from anything profitable and all that stupidity that ignores that time and materials have a cost: Hosting also has a cost. If someone’s streams can’t even support the money it costs them to stream it? That doesn’t last long and can lead to a nice payment plan if your VOD goes viral while you are asleep.
This attitude is how we got here, just let people have fun on the internet, not everything has to grow to be a replacement of something else. If people self host some streams for a few months and had fun, it was worth it.
Shame on me. If I just believe hard enough that will solve all bandwidth, data, hosting, and discoverability issues.
This is not at all a trivial problem. If it were, then aggregator sites like dig/reddit would have never taken over from message boards and youtube/twitch would have never beaten a tripod site with a relplayer (HISS!!!) video.
Cool, you know how to win on the internet, go off and do that.
You could say this exact same thing about any invention.
“But why would anyone want to speak into a wire? There’s literally no point.”
“Are you seriously going to wrap your food in plastic? There’s literally no point.”
“Who will want to type on a phone without any buttons? There’s literally no point.”
“Nobody is going to want to eat meat grown in a lab. There’s literally no point.”
Not everything needs to be built with a use in mind, and even if it has a small user base at first, needs change over time. For all we know this is visionary and ahead of its time, but we don’t know it yet.
Exactly my thought. At least the bots keep me company on twitch when I stream.
I disagree. I stream my games to friends regularly. Currently using a more basic approach (nginx rtmp mod, playback with vlc) because it runs better on my vps as compared to owncast which is more feature complete, but there is an actual use case for a self-hosted streaming solution.
So honest question, cant you do the same exact thing with less than half the effort by just streaming to twitch it discord?
Same reason you use Lemmy over Reddit.
I use both. More memes more fun
Yes you can, and should if that’s more your speed. I just prefer not to use corporate services if there’s an alternative.
The rtmp server can be run with docker https://hub.docker.com/r/tiangolo/nginx-rtmp/
Very cool project, as you can host your own stream on your own terms while publish to open/global directory and also integrates with Fediverse <3
Oh yes! Integrates with the Fediverse and announces to the Fediverse. I’m all about open and interoperable platforms.
I’m glad this exists, but as viewers go up, the bandwidth requirements for the streamer are just too large for one person to deal with unless they’re a corporation with ad profits to pay for it.
I suspect for this to be usable at large scale it will need to be bittorrent based.
I don’t personally agree. Again, I’ve had 70+ connections open at one time and when I estimated the cost of bandwidth, I wouldn’t even hit my monthly budget that Hetzner gives me for “free”. But Owncast has S3 and CDN support built in if you really need to handle something like that.
At what bitrate? I’m thinking about the big streamers with tens of thousands of viewers at once, most watching in 1080+.
I’m not really familiar with the capabilities of CDNs when it comes to live streams, but that could be good enough.
On that $8/month VPS I think at the time I had 2 qualities. 1080 5kbps was the 70+ open streams. I don’t expect “big streamers” to join Owncast soon if ever. But if they do, I imagine they have MORE than enough money to be able to afford a CDN or S3. We’re not talking MILLIONS per months. I don’t think even think we’re even talking thousands, hundreds probably. But yes. You make a good point. And sadly it’s the point that everyone instantly comes up with WHY folks shouldn’t use Owncast. I personally just try to create a welcoming community for anyone interested in trying Owncast. As time goes on those costs of tech continue to go down. If you’re running a server from your house, unless you have a datacap, then you don’t even need to worry about cost of bandwidth, obviously infrastructure does matter though.
As far as CDNs go, streams are just bunches of files. Your player goes out, grabs some files, and you watch it. So a CDN works for vidoe streams like anything else and I almost guarantee that Twitch leverages CDNs as well.
You could do the same with a S3 bucket as well. So if the CDN is too expensive (I honestly don’t know the prices), you could do a S3 bucket.
I have about 12 folks watching me on average at this point. Still better than I had on Twitch. :-) But also, this is MY page. I’ve tweaked the CSS to make it look more like mine. I can show what I want, I don’t have to jump through hoops to keep up with Twitch’s algorithm, I don’t have to show ads, my page doesn’t take 20 seconds to load because it’s loading all kinds of junk in the background. I love it personally. It’s mine. :-)
if they do, I imagine they have MORE than enough money to be able to afford a CDN or S3
As long as they’re continuing to run ads or getting enough “subscriptions” to maintain it. I don’t think any twitch streamer, no matter how big an audience they have or how much money they have, would go live just to burn through their cash.
sadly it’s the point that everyone instantly comes up with WHY folks shouldn’t use Owncast.
Yeah, that’s not the argument I’m making. Again, I love the idea of owncast, for all the reasons you gave in your last paragraph, but mostly just to give people the option to not be dependent on a for-profit corporation. But like with youtube, tiktok, and other video-based social platforms, they’re costly to run and moderate, and thus difficult to federate. I’m just trying to understand where its practical limits are right now.
streams are just bunches of files
Are they? Very short lived files I guess? Because the delay on a twitch stream can be as low as a couple of seconds. Not sure about owncast.
Yes, my understanding of anything on the web is that it’s STILL just files that are broken up and sent to you.
https://www.cloudflare.com/learning/video/what-is-streaming/
Streaming is the continuous transmission of audio or video files from a server to a client. In simpler terms, streaming is what happens when consumers watch TV or listen to podcasts on Internet-connected devices. With streaming, the media file being played on the client device is stored remotely, and is transmitted a few seconds at a time over the Internet.I reserve the right to be wrong about EVERYTHING! :-D
Cool, then yeah, provided the streamer is still making money on their stream, then paying for a CDN would probably be a good solution.
Might have to try this out some time just to see how complicated it is to get working.
Honestly it’s probably the easiest install I’ve ever done. :-D Don’t hesitate to ping me on Lemmy or on Matrix or where ever if you have any issues, questions, etc. :-)
If you’re interested, just go check out the directory. Go watch someone. See if anything strikes your fancy. :-) https://directory.owncast.online/
I’m not trying to sway your opinion in the least. It’s not for everyone in the least. I’m just trying to help folks realize there is a REAL alternative to the big platforms. We ARE talking on an open platform Reddit. ;-)
I stream on twitch. Can you multi stream and mirror chat from owncast to twitch and vice versa?
There are numerous folks that dual stream, I don’t know how folks do that. But I have some friends in Owncast that are in Matrix as well that could tell you. Ety (Owncast: https://ety.cybre.stream/) does exactly that.
I don’t see why multi streaming shouldn’t be possible using whatever you already use, you’ll just have to set one of the streams up as a custom location as I don’t think even OBS has own cast built into its options
And if there isn’t a bot already capable of mirroring chat I bet it’d be piss easy to make, though I’m not saying you should, more that “if there’s interest it’ll happen” kinda thing
Subscribed. I don’t do any streaming as of yet but I’m definitely curious about use case.
While I game, others play music, others show movies, there are even churches that use it to broadcast their mass, public broadcasting, etc. It’s fun imo. :-)
