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Comment by DevX101 | Hacker News Reader

What are the options for publishing a live stream from the browser with no desktop app? I'm not talking about WebRTC P2P meeting limited to 10 participants, but a stream that could be published to 100,000+ people. I'm open to paid development solutions.

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Hi! You mean just pick up from the browser, then publish stream to 100k+ people? That's not too difficult...

If you're ok with introducing a little bit of latency, the easiest way forward is webrtc to rtmp conversion. You could easily introduce headless mixing capability on top of https://github.com/voc/voctomix . We hacked together a quick and really dirty web frontend in https://github.com/FOSDEM/infrastructure/tree/master/ansible . It does the job, so we never felt the urge to change it...

Scaling the stream to ∞ viewers is easy using only free and open source software.

Feel free to get in touch.

Interesting! We've been looking for a replacement for our webinar platform which struggles with high load. How can I use Voctomix with guests who can join from their webcams via browser?

How do you get 100k+ people on a stream without having to have massive bandwidth? Where is the stream actually hosted?

sorry if I'm asking basic questions.

Scaling a stream is really easy using free and open source software if it's just broadcasting. rtmp backend, reverse proxy web server and hls. Done.

Scaling live interaction with really large numbers of participants is problematic both technically and socially. My research hasn't really yielded anything that can reliably scale beyond ~50 users using only free and open source software.

YT and FB allow live streaming your webcam from the browser, and there are some other options like restream Live Studio that offer simple features such as overlays/backgrounds. A full OBS-like web based studio does not exist (yet), as far as I'm aware.

I use a SaaS product [0] on my Chromebook which lets me stream various cameras to via RTMP. It was free (not sure how they make money, maybe they didn't have a monetization plan when I used it). It worked pretty well, I produced 3x streams (totaling around 19 hours) with it [1] on a Samsung Chromebook Pro, with some additional stream feeds coming into it from my Razer Phone.

[0] https://golightstream.com/studio/

[1] https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLVGEH-HLZ76olPRIBvbjH...

Edit: Seems like they have a monetization plan now, and it seems reasonably priced compared to other services I looked at like livestream.com

You probably need a server to pickup your webrtc stream and multicast it out, usually in an assortment of formats depending on platforms you are targeting. The video between you and the server probably needs to be WebRTC, but downstream from the server it can be mp4/mpg-dash, etc.

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