Owncast Self Hosted Live Streaming

By Kit Rhett Aultman — Nov 11, 2024 Owncast Newsletter November 2024 In This Issue

A Note From The Editor
Features
    Upcoming Events
    Featured Streamer: Kristoffer Lislegaard
    Closing Remarks

A Note From The Editor

Welcome back! I took the month of October off as a matter of personal mental health (I'm American; please guess why). But, if you're in the northern hemisphere, it's now the dark side of the year and the weather's getting less fun and it's time to think more about indoor hobbies...like streaming and watching Owncast! Kind note to anyone reading from the southern hemisphere...I've always wanted to do an endless summer and I've never before had more reasons to go on walkabout. So...if you've got a couch or even a place to pitch a tent, let me know!

Seriously, I'm really happy with everything we've got to share in the newsletter this month. Our featured streamer kinda broke into the Owncast community like a ton of bricks, and talking with him was a real treat. On top of that, our community calendar is looking quite flush. Go check these streams out. One thing that I love the most about finding all these streamers is marveling at how creative our community is!

As always, please circulate the newsletter widely, and remember that there's nothing to report if you don't share what's going on in your own projects. There's no community without you! Upcoming Events

This month, our calendar is dominated by the fine people at gravitons, who are doing a festival event. These are a wonderful collection of musical and spoken work performances, and are not to be missed!

In addition, friend of the newsletter 2tonwaffle is planning a video roundup of people's Owncast UI customizations and has asked that submissions for the video get in by November 15. The live stream and archived video will be available later this month. More information can be found on this Fediverse post.

November 16, 2024 @ 03:00 PM GMT - Screaming Alice @ gravitons festival
November 17, 2024 @ 03:00 PM GMT - Dan Powell @ gravitons festival
Thursday, Nov 21, 08:00 PM GMT - Rashamon @ gravitons festival
Saturday, Nov 23, 08:00 PM GMT - midierror @ gravitons festival
Sunday, Nov 24, 07:00 PM GMT - Remember Glaciers @ gravitons festival
Wednesday, Nov 27, 08:00 PM GMT - McCloud @ gravitons festival

Featured Streamer: Kristoffer Lislegaard

This month's featured streamer is a newcomer to the scene, but one who's been enthusiastically engaged and who's already made an outsized impact. Kristoffer Liselgaard is an electronic musician in Oslo, Norway, whose deep roots in streaming are now part of the Owncast community.

As ann assistant to the 300 Acting Spaces project, Kristoffer has a streaming experience stretching back over 12 years, including a performance with the legendary Hans-Joachim Roedelius. Kristoffer has since collaborated with Radio Free Fedi (RFF), where the New Year Par-Raid sparked his enthusiasm. He made his own debut in the RFF August series, which led to a great deal of buzz.

Krisfoffer's artistic interests are in exploring streaming as a unique media format. Expanding on the traditional concert format, he has explored the use of chromakey and compositing, changing aspect ratios, walls of custom emojis, feedback of the stream's video, and other experimental techniques. Of course, no stream is complete without the personal "in the studio" style streams, too.

Ultimately, his unique style has led to a lot of mentions in the chat rooms, and we've been excited to have him along for the ride. Like many of us, Kristoffer is a natural DIYer drawn to the personal freedom that self-managed streaming offers. No surprise that Owncast has been attractive to independent electronic musicians who often have to invent the tools they're looking for, but the results are a boon for us all.

If you like his work, Kristoffer's blog and newsletter can be found at his website. He also has released a new album, Subsupra, available on Bandcamp and Mirlo. Closing Remarks

Here in the southeast US where I live, November really starts the beginning of the "holiday season", where thoughts turn more to home and community. And the value of community has again been on my mind, and especially the value of a community that can't be held hostage for profit or political gain. It's exciting to know that, as the daylight shortens and the weather turns cold and misty, I've got so much quality independent content to watch.

Without an algorithm hijacking our community, though, comes the collective responsibility for discoverability and promotion. If you know of an interesting project, event, or bit of news, please do not hesitate to get in touch. Additionally, if you'd like to help build the social fabric of the Owncast community, please consider checking out the Owncast community on Lemmy or the #owncast-community channel on rocket.chat.

We'll be coming back in December with a 2024 retrospective. Until then, be good to each other and keep the streams running!

So I was wondering the bandwidth usage of Owncast and started crunching some numbers. Then I happened to find that @[email protected] had already done the work. Article linked, but here's one of the examples:

Example Scenario#

You’ve configured your broadcasting source (such as OBS) to stream to your Owncast instance at 5000kbps. You have 25 viewers. 5 of them are on slow or mobile networks, 17 of them have fast, stable internet, and 3 of them have fast internet most of the time but the speed fluctuates. All 25 viewers watched an entire stream that lasts two hours. You have a hosting provider that gives you 4TB of bandwidth per month.

Offer a high and low quality option

You decide to offer both a high and low quality option, and you set the high quality option to 5000kbps and the low quality option to 1500kbps.

How much bandwidth is used on your server for this stream?

How much CPU?

How is the viewer experience?

Result: You’ve provided both a high and low quality option for your viewers so those with a slow network have an option, and those with a fast network that might periodically slow down can dip down into the low quality when needed. Additionally, in this case you saved almost 20G of bandwidth traffic due to offering a lower quality. You’re using more CPU for a much better experience. You would be able to stream 43 times in a month before you hit your bandwidth limit.

Freedom, flexibility and fun. Taking back your live streams with Owncast by Gabe Kangas

Live internet video streaming isn't as complex and scary as it's made out to be. Let's talk about why you might want to run your own self-hosted live video streams using Owncast, and learn about how video streaming works along the way.

During the session, we will create a live stream from scratch by installing Owncast, and find out what's needed to successfully offer a quality stream to your viewers, scaling it to a larger audience when needed.

What is Owncast, and why would you want to use it to run a self-hosted live video stream?
How does live video streaming work? What does it require?
We will install and configure Owncast to create a live stream from scratch.
Discuss chat, social, interactivity, and viewer engagement features to enable different levels of viewer participation.
And we'll go over how to scale your video stream to a larger audience.

Link to talk details and author bio: events.canonical.com/event/31/contributions/207/