Hey Unraid folks,

 

I have been on a "selfhost all the things" spree since I have assembled a new NAS with Unraid a year ago, so far so good and happy. And one of the topics I looked into was live streaming because who does not want a DIY Twitch  not out of necessity, just fun, the audience would be my friends if anything but this is really more an attempt at getting something useable up and running at all.
Owncast was an easy find thanks to a readily available docker image in the Unraid Community Apps and it basically worked quite well, but my internet was slow so it did not perform that stellar without dropping quality and bitrate. I put it back on the backburner after experimenting.
But since I've switched to a speedy fiber recently I have been looking back into this... and while Owncast works fine, I found out that it is quite far from low latency even in best circumstances no matter my tinkering, 7~8 seconds behind live, even watching from local network.
But Owncast is not really geared for low latency anyway (to my understanding), at least not for something like being 1 to 2 seconds max behind the source or lower, which would be what I would wish to achieve. I wanna be able to chat and interact with the few friends that I would coax into watching

 

I have been looking around at other solutions but there is nothing quite as easy to setup as Owncast it seems.
It's not too bad if there is no Unraid CA app available, nothing against setting up images from Hub but I haven't had any luck finding something that would fulfill the low latency wish while still being easy to serve to watchers.

I found Project Lightspeed, which unfortunately is not being actively developed anymore but even the existing setup consists of juggling 3 dockers and while I got far enough that I could feed a stream from OBS into the ingest docker, but either the WebRTC docker or the React docker were still having problems, none that I could easily identify and fix, the player page at least did not register any kind of output and no docker logs showed any errors.

I managed to get Restreamer up and running but I did not manage to produce anything with low latency, it performed similar to Owncast but its not as comfortable.

Other than that I found Oven Media Engine and Simple Realtime Server but both are not straight forward to set up and I fail already with getting their dockers running in the first place when I try to set their config paths up in AppData so I can edit them but I prolly might be doing something wrong there... They'd also require some player page set up and pointed at them as far as I understood, they are not serving this themselves.

On my research into this I found that WebRTC seems to be the way to go in terms of latency but there isn't really anything comfortable to use there.
I found vdo.ninja, which doesn't require any elaborate setup (and you can still selfhost their webpage if you want) but it expects a separate video and audio feed, so it does not directly take a stream from OBS, though you can set OBS to put out to a virtual webcam that you can hand in as video source. And this was blazingly fast. But with the way vdo does not take a single audio + video stream from OBS, you will have to look into fiddling with virtual audio devices to split audio sources if you do not want to just capture desktop audio and this I find ugly. Ideally I want to find something that I can directly feed from OBS for easy game video + audio capture, separate from other audio sources.
 

That's how far I got with my occasional evening dabbling in this. As I said, this is just for fun and exploring the topic, but if there'd be anything I would set as a requirement, it would be its latency being as low as can be and ideally easy to serve.

And yes, obviously I have been using Discord already for pretty much the same, but the goal is to self host  and be in control of all the options. For serving a few buddies I reckon fiber should be good enough, at least that is what I wanna find out.

But first I gotta get something set up that can demonstrate low latency in my local network so I know its worth testing what a remote connection will be getting.

Did anybody else ever look into this and has some insights to share or recommendations?

Edited December 16, 20223 yr by Crovaxon
Edited for clarity

Check out Craft Computing's cloud gaming series on youtube, should give you some ideas

14 hours ago, Michael_P said:

Check out Craft Computing's cloud gaming series on youtube, should give you some ideas

Ah I might have been a tad ambiguous in the title (fixed now) but I am not looking to set up remote gaming, but live streaming  unless they have covered that topic too, though I had no luck finding anything on live streaming on their channel. Hope its not buried somewhere in the video series.

It's not really something I know much about, but maybe this blog post could help : https://unraid.net/blog/unraid-6-9-capture-encoding-and-streaming-server

26 minutes ago, ChatNoir said:

It's not really something I know much about, but maybe this blog post could help : https://unraid.net/blog/unraid-6-9-capture-encoding-and-streaming-server

Ah yeah, I had seen that blog post, it is about having Unraid take care of the OBS work load of transcoding and sending the stream to your target platform(s), the gaming PC is just busy feeding the OBS container then. I also read the previous multi restream blog post and while both blog posts are useful, it is not what I am looking for. I am not trying to feed my live stream to any of the online platforms, I want to serve the stream myself to viewers.

I only ever stream via Discord to my buddies, which works well and latency is quite low, but I am of course tied to Discord's limitations there. And in the spirit of self hosting, I want to explore how feasible it is to instead be my own streaming service, basically I want to be my own Twitch - and this in the most low latency possible way, so I could still feasibly interact with viewers on a more direct basis.