Video Streaming for Cloudron
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Increasingly, people want to broadcast livestream video to a wide audience. Censorious, Big Tech platforms are found unsatisfactory and self-hosted streaming will be sought.
What solutions could Cloudron offer, other than PeerTube? (How effective is PeerTube, by the way?)
https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted#media-streaming---video-streaming
https://openstreamingplatform.com/
https://owncast.online/
https://github.com/Zibbp/Radium
https://datarhei.github.io/restreamer/
https://github.com/streamaserver/streama
https://git.mills.io/prologic/tubeHas anybody tried comparing these? What are they like? I think compatibility with OBS (Open Broadcast Studio) would be an important benefit, as it is widely used Free Software for streaming.
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Would love to know about PeerTube's live streaming capabilities as well. Has anyone tried it?
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@girish yes. About 25 seconds delay in live transmission. But: hey, it works
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@luckow How well does peertube scale to larger audiences? For example, presumably it is OK with 10 people watching a stream, but what about 100 or even 1,000?
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@LoudLemur Interesting question
What does well mean? Where can you collect testers to test this? From which countries do they come? What are the standard VPS specs for testing? What is the default setup on Cloudron (one, two, three, many apps)? Is the Peertube instance just for streaming or a relevant video platform for your community? Is federation enabled and your instance follows a lot of other instances?My clear opinion on this topic (biased by a lot of experience with video conferencing solutions): if your case relies on streaming and you don't want to invest time or money and are okay with potential GDPR-related decisions, take the big platforms to stream to your audience. Otherwise, be clear about your expectations and set up a reliable infrastructure just for the streaming part.
My setup (many apps on a Cloudron instance with 6 cores and 32 GB RAM, default Peertube settings from the app package) serves up to 10 people ok-ish.
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Since we're talking about streaming another important factor is bandwidth. Does your vps have a network interface that would be able to handle 100 full hd streams?
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@fbartels to be fair: I only had 1GB bandwidth in mind
That is imho the "normal" bandwidth for vps. -
@luckow The use case I had in mind is a livestream video, for example, something like you would have broadcasting / teleconferencing a Mass at Church. 90% or more of the participants are passively receiving the stream at home, for example. They are all being sent the same video at the same time. Afterwards there might be a "download broadcast" option for the archives.
Interactions could be permitted via a text-chat tool. At specific moments, for a short duration during the stream, the audio might come from one of the congregation, during a reading, for example.
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@LoudLemur in my understanding, streaming (especially Live) is not so much a question of technology, but of scale and server/bandwidth resources to support dozens, hundreds, thousands of connections. It is necessary to consider use case and scale in order to answer effective performance.
OBS Ninja is a good example. Relatively simple to install/host. But how much does it support ? I don't know, but I would guess on most VPS servers or even small dedicated servers, it would be relatively limited.
Happy for someone to challenge this understanding. Would love to be proved wrong.
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@timconsidine Good to see you and I hope you have some calm in your life in these difficult times.
I think peer-to-peer technology is ideal for situations like livestreaming, when there is a peak in demand, and everybody wants the same thing at the same time.
There have been some reasonably successful attempts to solve the Content Delivery Network problem using IPFS, but it is far from ready for packaging, unfortunately.
Galacteek has some video functionality integrated into it, but I haven't tried using that yet.
A couple of people have said that Jitsi works ok for situations like livestreaming a mass, though only up to a certain number of users, maybe 20-40, something like that.
If Cloudron is somehow able to help people deploy self-hosted livestreaming effectively, it could help transform the entertainment industry.
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@LoudLemur yes P2P may be a solution to load from mass scaling.
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I think OwnCast would be great. I have requested Red5 Open Source here:
https://forum.cloudron.io/topic/6672/red5-open-source-on-cloudron-video-streaming
Apart from Red5 there is also:
Open Streaming Platform
https://gitlab.com/osp-group/flask-nginx-rtmp-manager -
Some progress has recently been made on Jitsi making it easier to livestream from Jitsi to PeerTube, both of which are supported on Cloudron.
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@LoudLemur I think, if I remember correctly, that Peertube is using pretty much a principle in the like of
Galacteek has some video functionality integrated into it, but I haven't tried using that yet.
I also think it's implemented by default however one can also opt-out. Of course, the more user share the streaming power the more audience can be reached.
In such case as a community, there's more possibilities that something like that can be achieved as everyone should then collaborate for the good of the community and thus, keep the browser sharing utility on as a contribution.
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@timconsidine said in Video Streaming for Cloudron:
@LoudLemur in my understanding, streaming (especially Live) is not so much a question of technology, but of scale and server/bandwidth resources to support dozens, hundreds, thousands of connections. It is necessary to consider use case and scale in order to answer effective performance.
I think you have a pretty good idea of how that should be thought from the basis. So, in this regard, asking oneself for a start, what's the ultimate goal using video streaming or even podcasts or video sharing would be worth spending a bit of time on the question.
As @luckow mentioned about the possibilities and limitations of a VPS using a 1G bandwidth, it is important to keep in mind that for live streaming to large audiences it will eventually take more than 1G of bw output to smoothly scale streaming to such audience, whatever output capacity you have on your server. When you get in the thousands of live viewers even increasing RAM on the server won't be sufficient, it will help but you will need a bigger pipe to push it out.
OBS Ninja is a good example. Relatively simple to install/host. But how much does it support ? I don't know, but I would guess on most VPS servers or even small dedicated servers, it would be relatively limited.
OBS is used on your local rig and so it depends on your local resources to reach the streaming service server.
I know Peertube has live streaming capacities as well, however I haven't had the time to test it out yet. It would be interesting to learn about anyone else who might have tested this already, and if tested with OBS and well it works, or not lol
Happy for someone to challenge this understanding. Would love to be proved wrong.
Happy to prove you right
