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Comment by nlh | Hacker News Reader

Very cool! Sorry for the novice question but I checked the docs and FAQ and didn’t see an answer:

Can you explain a bit the dynamics of streaming from your own server? How does bandwidth / broadcast work? Do you need enough upstream bandwidth to support (Stream bitrate * # of clients)? Or is there a broadcast protocol that takes advantage of a CDN? My understanding of the commercial services is that their value isn’t just in providing a server, but it’s the huge amount of bandwidth required to support N simultaneous high bitrate streams. But maybe I have a misunderstanding.

Thanks!

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A super brief summary of the streaming protocol is that you encode short (3-10 second) clips that are available on a URL, and then clients play these clips in order. For storage of these clips you could use an external storage or CDN - see the docs at https://owncast.online/docs/s3/ for more :)

Edit: Of course this means that this

> Do you need enough upstream bandwidth to support (Stream bitrate * # of clients)?

is indeed the case, but you can offload that to the external storage.

ffmpeg is able to capture from webcam, desktop, or vod

you only need the correct software and public ip , and upload bandwidth to stream properly

how would you do this ?

install ffmpeg , setup a bash script to capture from webcam or device, install nginx or lighttpd to serve basic html with the HLS video.js player. map your ip or dynamic to your www.myname.com , to make it better you would also add a cheap cdn, such as bunnyCDN.com 5euros per month for 1TB

you create a add your domain.com on bunnycdn.com, and create a new subdomain cdn.domain.com which directs to the bunnycdn.com/username they provide you. thats it.

the file segments would be offloaded on their servers basically , they provide feature on how long you want to keep the segments on their global servers.

the same way all this works, could be done with webtorrent live streaming on webRTC, some adult sites live streaming adult sites have already started to use this method webRTC peer to peer

Super cool - great answer and thank you!

As someone else mentioned, you'd likely want to run this on a "cloud" server with the necessary bandwidth available.

Reminds me of running a Shoutcast station back in the early/mid 2000's. At first I was just playing around and had the Winamp plugin configured to stream to the server running on the same PC. I think I used one of those dynamic DNS services to keep it accessible to the outside world but I may have just updated it when my WAN IP occasionally changed (oh...those sweet, naive days of not worrying when I opened those kinds of ports). A 128kbps mp3 stream to a few people at a time was workable.

Eventually a guy I knew from some web forum offered to host the server for me. He worked for a small-ish ISP and hosting company and said they'd never notice or care if I bounced it off their server because even 10 or 20 people streaming 128kbps at once wouldn't even show up on their radar. Sure enough, I had no issues and never even had anyone come complaining that I was streaming my personal selection of music without paying any licensing fees.

That said, I eventually got a little worried and began to research the cost of licensing. I didn't like the idea of getting sued and this was still the time of RIAA lawsuits against p2p services. Unfortunately, it was also the time when they lobbied hard to increase the cost of legit licensing for streaming. Whereas radio only pays for a blanket license, streamers had to be able to track per-song-per-listener numbers and also pay royalties, unlike terrestrial radio.

That sorta put the kibosh on my streaming radio ambitions. A nerdy personal experiment was one thing, but I was starting to get enough listeners that I wasn't eager to end up on the wrong end of a nasty letter from someone's legal department. The cost of going "legit" had become too high and honestly, I didn't have enough original/local/whatever content to offer anything unique. At best it was like having "free" XM radio back when that was all the rage before Youtube and Spotify made such things irrelevant.

You just missed the step where you quickly become 10x bigger than any member of the recording industry and become the one telling politicians how to re-write their silly laws.

But I hear you had better luck with your room-sharing app.

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