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Comment by at_a_remove | Hacker News Reader

This all looks like a lot of Very New Design Decisions. I tend not to be an early adopter on these, although it is mostly moot because I am no longer in the video delivery business. I have been considering streaming sets of short films, commercials, trailers, and movies to friends in a live stream via a pipeline of comparatively hoary old tech:

1) A playlist of multiple different video files in VLC as a source for ...

2) OBS Studio, which produces RTMP to be consumed by ...

3) nginx, which calls ffmpeg to produce multiple birates and resolutions to be rebundled as HLS to be sent to ...

4) a "live TV" channel of my own specification as an input to JellyFin, which can be read by ...

5) various clients on Roku, Apple TV, Firestick, Chromecast "apps"

At this point, I don't think the industry will ever really settle down to something manageable.

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I do something like this by using https://github.com/ffplayout/ffplayout-engine

Thank you, that looks like that could replace steps one, two, and three with a single step!

If your friends have access to VLC on all of their devices, and have some appetite for tech, why not use an RTSP server and just hand them RTSP URLs as "channels"? You don't get browser playback, but as long as everyone has VLC or an RTSP capable media player they can just open the stream on whatever device they have.

Said friends are not technical. They want something on their Roku, their Firestick, etc.

Oh gotcha. Ya, then your setup sounds great, and it looks like ffplayout will simplify a lot of the steps!

I just proposed that setup because that's what my partner and friends do to view livestreams of movies together or, specifically with my partner, our home security camera setup. We're all technical though and I don't offer the rest of my family this setup.

I somehow ended up as Technical Guy out of the people I know. It can be a burden.

Livestreaming is, well, "the space" exists but it largely occupied by solutions where the Hollywood types figured this time they won't be caught on the back foot, so they're busy policing what is sent around, so the homegrown stuff is largely where it is at if you want shove movies around, but then you're veering into "how technical are the recipients?" and it gets interesting.

I used to run a RealServer decades ago. Video is always ... interesting.

Why steps 2 and 3? I mean, I don't totally see the reasons for not consuming the video files directly with ffmpeg, instead of going in such roundabout way to bring the media into it.

Well, and understand I haven't yet attempted this, but apparently the discontinuities between switching files has caused a lot of problems downstream for Jellyfin, so OBS Studio would exist as kind of a way to smooth out the transitions.

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