How to make a self-hosted video livestream | Hacker News Reader

How to make a self-hosted video livestream

drewdevault.com

101 pointsddevault10 comments

As I do some middlingly professional-ish video livestreaming--I run a three/four camera show most Fridays for the Boston fighting game scene, we're newish to streaming but it's one of the biggest locals in the country--it was natural to look into the costs of self-hosted streaming. They're pretty prohibitive. Data is either expensive (AWS) or bandwidth-constrained (DigitalOcean etc.). Running from local is likewise not a reasonable option, either because of bottlenecked uploads (yo, Comcast) or just because it's simply unsafe to rely on something like a consumer connection, even if it's FiOS, to upload a show.

I don't have a good solution to this, unfortunately. The biggest benefit to Twitch is that it becomes possible for fifty or five hundred people to find you; the algorithm can be your friend if you're lucky or good. The second-biggest benefit to Twitch is that if fifty or five hundred people come by, your stream is not going to melt.

Has anyone considered hosts like OVH/SoYouStart? They have unmetered bandwidth and are quite affordable, and can be even cheaper on Kimsufi if you're willing to compromise on the SLA.

Here are servers for around 40$/month with 250Mbps with unmetered traffic: https://www.soyoustart.com/en/essential-servers/

Kimsufi is even cheaper with 100Mbps unmetered starting at around 5$: http://www.kimsufi.com/en/servers.xml

Of course; it'd be pretty shortsighted not to, yeah?

Setting aside OVH/SoYouStart's generally kinda crap support (and maybe it's just that I do devops professionally but even for my own stuff I expect some support, not emoji shrugs and a lack of English), "unmetered bandwidth" doesn't come with a wide enough pipe. 250Mbps is 40 users at 6Mbps/user, assuming nearly perfect bandwidth usage. One of my weekly streams hits 20-25 without us having advertised yet; these are alpha tests/pre-production streams. We should hit 50-60 when we go for-realsies live, if not more.

The next step, then, is to build your own star topology to stream to users. And your own load balancing. All to, uh, not make money on it and to, uh, not have as good of an experience either for the viewer or for the creator as you do when using Twitch or Mixer or YouTube (I don't care how ~~fierce~~ your Twitter game is, a Twitch notification is gonna get you further than the hot tweets).

Companies are willing to burn a lot of money and make you the beneficiary. So, right now, I do, and I tend to think even HN types are best off doing likewise.

I am not so sure about using DASH. It's becoming a royalty source for the MPEG LA: http://www.streamingmedia.com/Articles/Editorial/Featured-Ar...

FWIW we are using HLS for live streaming with a fallback of RTMP to Flash for super legacy browsers.

You have a good point here. I would question the wisdom of falling back to Flash, though. Native support of both dash AND hls in web browsers is terrible.

https://caniuse.com/#feat=mpeg-dash

https://caniuse.com/#feat=http-live-streaming

HLS can be done in much the same fashion as described in my article with https://github.com/video-dev/hls.js/tree/master I might do a follow-up with the necessary changes.

Why not use html5 video? I actually don't have a good idea of the ven diagram surrounding the layers or overlap in functionality. Is there a reason DASH is necessary?

This does leverage html5 video, but without some help html5 video doesn't support live streaming. The browser expects all videos to be finite. This works by stringing together a series of finite videos indefinitely. DASH can also be used to offer different streams at various bitrates.

That makes sense. Is it really so complex that there needs to be a licensed technology?

Not in my opinion, no, but the MPEG group is notorious for abusing their patents.

Thanks for the quality article. I was going to reply with the same; why not use HLS. The point of poor support, especially in Chrome, is a good one, though.

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