Hijacking the PS5's RTMP stream
yashgarg.dev
yashgarg.dev
I used to work in this space and Lightstream was always doing interesting things, even if they never seemed to find PMF.
1: https://support.golightstream.com/hc/en-us/articles/38643168...
You can have customers without product market fit.
A product that hasnt found PMF could be a solution looking for a problem, or it might solve a true problem but that problem isn't important, durable, or (crucially) common enough to sustain a business.
So OP was saying that Lightstream Studios made some great stuff, but that ultimately the problem they were solving wasnt durable or widespread enough for the market to sustain the business they had built.
Background on Lighstream Studios is they did a streamer setup in the cloud, so you didnt have to run OBS locally. A lot of people seemed to want that at the time, especially console gamers, but the market changed around them. Consoles are way better at streaming without any other stuff now, and PC gamers largely settled on running OBS (for free) on their own existing hardware. They had like 17k paying customers at one point, so customers wasnt the smoking gun here.
So the customers went away (not durable), and didn’t have enough customers (not widespread)?
A good example is the voice assistant hardware from Amazon and Google. The speakers are everywhere, basic daily use stats are likely solid, and retail display square footage remains huge. Yet almost no one will pay for the associated subscriptions or other premium services. The hardware was sold at a loss(?) expecting downstream revenue from services that customers simply don't value enough to buy.
Sounds like you don’t have a customer, in the sense that I will also accept a free chocolate bar someone hands me on the street but won’t pay for it.
I take your point that PMF is useful to describe a thing. I just see it as a funny term to describe something obvious. But language evolves in different social groups and this is the language of SV. In large part I find it odd because I’m not part of that group and have other ways of describing the same thing. Accepting that neither is right or wrong.
There are plenty of companies (successful ones) that I’d argue don’t have PMF, but have plenty of customers (ex Palantir)
RTMP and all the video and audio protocols behind it aren't trivial either - I bet there are hundreds of exploits waiting to be found that any three letter agency sitting on the internet can use to take over your PS5 and all credentials stored within too...
So somewhat unlikely to be able to exploit it but have at it hass.
I'd imagine it'd be easier to exploit the server side, actually.
The client on the other hand I would guess is running it's code as root, or at least something with full GPU access.
There are extensions to RTMP to use encryption or even just TLS. But do you mean that the risk of fragments of audio and video bitstreams going out unprotected presents a remote code execution risk? That seems less a problem of vulnerability and more one of privacy.
The OP didn’t intercept rtmp url, they intercepted the discovery endpoint.
> redirects the actual stream to the Mac without any certificate issues.
gst-launch-1.0 v4l2src device=/dev/video0 ! videoconvert ! autovideosink sync=false
Any decent ones? I own a few that I use for managing (semi)headless machines and they all manage maybe 2-3fps
Then there are all kinds of USB cards from dubiously named manufacturers, most being some white label chip that everyone uses. Some can work decently, some have a terrible capture rate like you mentioned. Due to the nature of these sellers popping up and disappearing, I can't really make a recommendation.
The lowest end of HDMI captures used to use HDMI-PAL converter wired to an S-Video capture chip onboard. That was completely superseded by MacroSilicon MS21xx chips that actually capture HDMI. The ones that are now everywhere are based on those MacroSilicon chips.
I have a bunch of the Hagibis branded ones, and they work perfectly for capturing 1080p60 from laptops and cameras.
The author mentions that the PS5 uses RTMPS to push video up to twitch - but suddenly it just uses plain RTMP?
Original article does complain about headphones, but I don't think Sony uses Bluetooth for their Playstation 5 headphones either, just their Playstation Link ones that are custom USB 2.4Ghz like most other gaming headsets
So far there have been zero games that have had issues. Granted I've only really had time to play 5 or so games, but I am genuinely impressed with how far it's come.
The one game I couldn't actually get working was Escape from Tarkhov because it has some windows-only anticheat. I.e. the developers chose to make it not work, not an accident.
But immutable distros stay in a clean state, updates become trivial and safe, and can roll back in case of a failure.
I also have a big gaming PC/AI development with a NVIDIA GPU and, yeah, NVIDIA's app to maintain drivers is a little skeezy but I just download games on Steam and they "just work" though I am not really a day one kind of gamer unless it is a new Dynasty Warriors or Fate game.
I'll grant that kernel anti-cheat sucks, if you play that kind of game and cheating bothers you well then... Maybe a locked down environment like the PS5 is a feature and not a bug.
In 2026 I still have to mess with game settings, driver issues, and DRM garbage behavior as a primarily PC gamer. PC gaming is still a long way from "just works" and I think you probably just take for granted a lot of things you have to do to make it work vs a typical console experience.
I got into console gaming in the late 00's and had a few portables and an Xbox 360 and a PS 3 just after they became obsolete and played through the libraries. My favorite games were games for the PS Vita from Japanese publishers like Altus, Idea Factory and Acquire. When Sony and the publishers quit investing in the Vita those games went right to Steam. And my experience with Steam is, "click on the Steam icon", pair the Xbox controller, use the controller to pick a game, and sit back. Like yeah, there still are sweaty keyboard-and-mouse games and I might even play one once in a while, but I'd say my experience on the big machine is "console like" with the condition that the kind of games I play are "console like" games.
These days the only difference between PC and Console is having a locked down OS. Which makes consoles seem purely a worse product, but the difference used to be a lot more.
I think that was the point?