Show HN: Lightspeed – subsecond, open source, self hosted stream from OBS

https://github.com/GRVYDEV/Project-Lightspeed

by GRVYDEV • 6 years ago

452 138 6 years ago

GRVYDEV23• 6 years ago

Welcome to Project Lightspeed. This is a project that allows anyone to easily deploy their own sub-second latency live-streaming server. In its current state you can stream from OBS [1] and watch that stream back from any desktop browser.

This has been a super fun project which has taught me more than any other project I have done. It uses Rust, Go and React and can be deployed fairly easily on a very lightweight server. For example, I have been doing my test streams on a $5 Digital Ocean droplet and the CPU usage is at around 20%. Granted not a lot of people are watching however it is more lightweight than a solution such as Janus.

The point of this project is twofold. First I wanted to learn more about WebRTC and real-time communication in general. Second, I wanted to provide a platform where people can setup their own little live-stream environment. Maybe you just want a place where you and some friends can hang out or you are sick of the main-stream platforms.

Anyhow as of writing this post it is v0.1.0 and considered an MVP release. In the coming months I (and hopefully some of you :)) will be adding more features and trying to flesh this out into as much of a full featured platform as possible. Feel free to take a look at the repo and let me know what you all think :)

[1] Open Broadcast Software (OBS): https://obsproject.com/

12things• 6 years ago

A very interesting project, can you elaborate more on how it is getting sub second latency and why youtube/twitch seem to have more than a few seconds of delay.

GRVYDEV23• 6 years ago

YouTube and twitch use RTMP which operates over TCP. This means that each time we send a packet we need to ensure that it’s been received which adds latency overhead. Lightspeed uses the FTL protocol which operates over udp thus reducing the latency overhead

imtringued• 6 years ago

HTTP video streams are split into segments and those segments are delivered whole. Larger segments are easier to cache and scale to bigger number of viewers. The other factor is that youtube and twitch spend more CPU time on compression to achieve lower bitrates.

simlevesque• 6 years ago

Could it be possible to use WebRTC to have listeners become seeders/repeaters so you could have more listener without impacting too much your own CPU ? Something like AceStream.

GRVYDEV23• 6 years ago

Yup! You could develop a web of WebRTC relays

ghostie_plz• 6 years ago

Thanks for sharing! I was actually just looking for something like this earlier today, can't wait to try it out.

GRVYDEV23• 6 years ago

I can’t wait for you to try it out haha!

rlyshw2• 6 years ago

This project is pretty cool, I’ll tinker around with it tomorrow.

As an aside, I’ve noticed you’re building out your own stream protocol stack (FTL/LightSpeed). What’s the reasoning there? Seems slightly inconvenient to have to “hack” OBS to make the output stream work. Will FTL support be merged into OBS in the future?

If you’re just trying to avoid the latency of RTMP then I might suggest considering the existing SRT protocol[1]. It’s been open source for a while and is well-established(native support in OBS core and optional in FFMPEG). Seems to already solve a lot of the transport-level stuff that you’re working on with FTL.

[1] Secure Reliable Transport: https://github.com/Haivision/srt

GRVYDEV23• 6 years ago

So FTL is supported by OBS and was used by Mixer. I’m interested to move to SRT in the future since you’re correct, FTL support will be going away eventually

GRVYDEV23• 6 years ago

Also the work required to adapt what I have to SRT is non trivial and I would rather have something that works right now and then build in SRT support in the future

GRVYDEV23• 6 years ago

Also, you’re not “hacking” obs. oBS is compiled with the FTL sdk you just have to tell it to use it.

rapsey5• 6 years ago

SRT seems like an overly complicated solution that has already been solved by KCP protocol.

oblio• 6 years ago

Really cool! You say you use Rust and Go. Why both? I imagine Rust for super performance sensitive stuff and Go for the rest, for faster development?

codetrotter• 6 years ago

This was going to be my question too basically.

Hoping to see OP answer this and in particular what I would like to see them comment on is how they divide their codebase between these two languages. Which parts are being implemented in which of those languages and why.

Personally a huge proponent of Rust.

rektide2• 6 years ago

I think it was a matter of what libraries were available where. Namely, Lightspeed-webrtc uses the extremely popular & robust Go library Pion[1] for webrtc. It's a little over 500 lines.

The Rust Lightspeed-ingest[2] server is also ~500 lines of code, and primarily handshakes the FTL protocol used to communicate with OBS.

There is a Pion port to rust[3] that is in progress. I am not sure the state of this work. Pion is used quite extensively by many many projects; I'm not sure if the rust webrtc-rs port has any notable users yet. As I began by saying, I expect the trustability & extensiveness of Pion is what lead to lightspeed-webrtc being written in Go.

[1] https://pion.ly/

[2] https://github.com/GRVYDEV/Lightspeed-ingest

[3] https://github.com/webrtc-rs/webrtc

morsch5• 6 years ago

Awesome! I was looking for something like this when trying to play a local multiplayer game via the Internet in an early lockdown.

There are, or were, no good turnkey solutions for this. Twitch and Youtube have 5-10s latency, which is often not good enough. Mixer promised (and presumably delivered) ~1s latency using the FTL protocol you use, but they had a wait list of a couple of days or weeks, and of course now, they don't exist anymore. Even Steam Play Together, ostensibly built for this purpose, wasn't low latency enough in my limited experience (this really surprised me, so maybe I'm doing it wrong).

The easiest solution, use the share desktop function of whatever video conference tool, almost works, but they universally seemed reduce the frame rate, which is ok for presentations but unsuitable for games (also, no audio). My solution was to output OBS to a virtual webcam device and use Jitsi Meet. A bit roundabout, but it worked wonderfully.

Ideally, I'd forgo the DO droplet, and just run everything locally. 20% of a small droplet is even less of a modern desktop computer's CPU. Which leaves upload bandwidth for broadcast, which depends on your connection and how many people you need to be able to stream to.

ossopite• 6 years ago

I've played local multiplayer games over parsec (https://parsec.app/), it works great and is pretty much turnkey

Warchamp72• 6 years ago

Have you tried Discords GoLive sharing?

rapsey5• 6 years ago

Why do you need such low latency for live streaming? For the majority of cases 10s latency does not really matter.

adrianN• 6 years ago

Twitch has a low latency mode https://help.twitch.tv/s/article/low-latency-video?language=...

craftkiller• 6 years ago

I have a pretty low-latency setup for that but it wasn't completely turnkey. First you set up nginx with the rtmp module[1]. Then you can use OBS to stream your desktop to the RTMP server. I set OBS to send a keyframe every 1 second.

On the client side you have two options:

1. For low-latency game streaming, I would suggest watching through the RTMP stream. The RTMP module for nginx will re-broadcast your RTMP stream to all the clients that connect. I was able to get a latency of around 1 second by watching through:

   ffplay -fflags nobuffer -loglevel verbose rtmp://my-servers-ip-address/live/test

I would expect better latency from a webrtc solution like Lightspeed but 1 second latency is pretty good for only having to install nginx.

2. HLS/Dash. The nginx RTMP module will also expose the video stream as HLS/Dash which is just cutting the stream up into files and serving them over http. Personally I set my segment size to 1 second and my playlist size to 4 seconds. Through this I get approximately a 4-second latency. Not great for competitive multiplayer games like Jackbox but if you're playing something like a world building game with friends then its acceptable. The real benefit to HLS/Dash is you can easily watch it through an html5 web video player or even a chromecast[2].

Bits you can add on top:

- I put my HLS/Dash directories in a tmpfs mount for speed and reduced wear on the drives

- I put the nginx stream module in front of my rtmp module so that it can handle TLS (making it RTMPS)

[1] https://github.com/arut/nginx-rtmp-module

On FreeBSD it was just a checkbox in the nginx port, so the work involved may vary by distro.

[2] I haven't attempted to play the RTMP stream through chromecast so for all I know, that might be supported too. All I've tested so far on chromecast is an HLS stream using the "castnow" CLI program. The Shaka player, which is a web player, will support chromecasting an HLS stream from your browser but I've only tested their demo videos, not my personal streams, and I had to use official google chrome, not chromium, but it worked on both android and linux.

nemetroid• 6 years ago

Even Steam Play Together, ostensibly built for this purpose, wasn't low latency enough in my limited experience (this really surprised me, so maybe I'm doing it wrong).

I've had good experience with Steam Play Together, mostly playing Unrailed (a hectic game in the style of Overcooked). I definitely forget about the remote connection while playing. We were 1000 km apart, but had quite a good connection (100 Mbit, 15-20 ms ping).

ReaganFJones• 6 years ago

I confirm that Mixer delivered on the sub-second latency claims. As far as I know, FTL's performance is in line with WebRTC's performance. As long as the servers in-between are fast, a good WebRTC implementation should match it.

Unfortunately, with Mixer's death, I don't think there are any major turnkey players left with low latency sub-second streaming. I'd probably use Discord as a primary alternative which uses WebRTC with Discord's servers in-between.

If your home connection has the bandwidth to support the load of multiple users, a service that does direct P2P like Parsec will probably give the best performance.

justaj2• 6 years ago

Thanks for making this project possible.

Have you tried streaming via Tor? Is it possible to achieve streaming via Tor even if subsecond delay can't be achieved?

Lucasoato• 6 years ago

Wouldn't you have bandwidth problems by streaming via Tor?

dodgepong3• 6 years ago

You should know the OBS team plans on deprecating FTL since Mixer was the only major player who ever used it, not to mention the fact that the server side of the tech is closed. The FTL implementation in OBS is buggy, and keeping it maintained is not worth the effort for a non-standard transport protocol.

GRVYDEV23• 6 years ago

Yes I am aware however there is a new service called Glimesh that is utilizing FTL so I dont think it is going to disappear tomorrow. Also I have implemented the server side so it does not matter that it is closed.

captn3m0• 6 years ago

Any way to push non-OBS content to Lightspeed? I've been trying to run a sub-second latency game-livestream (ala twitch plays), and I'd rather run it on a headless server without OBS.

xd19362• 6 years ago

It should work, as long as you're sending it to the server over FTL[1], which is a pretty new and uncommon protocol developed by the now-defunct Mixer.

1. https://github.com/mixer/ftl-sdk

rektide2• 6 years ago

The ingress components is interesting to me. It takes the OBS stream, via the FTL protocol, & converts it into something for WebRTC to use, yes? What drove you to use FTL protocol for ingestion? Did you consider alternatives like RTMP, which I believe OBS also supports?

I hand't heard of FTL before. Apparently it was a protocol used in Microsoft's now-defunct game-streaming service, Mixer. I found some discussion of the various streaming protocols here[1], which included some description of FTL.

I guess it comes down to latency. That would still have left SRT on the table, yes?

Great project. Such a key area of connectivity for us all. So glad you did this. Thanks.

[1] https://restream.io/blog/streaming-protocols/

GRVYDEV23• 6 years ago

I went with FTL instead of RTMP for the sake of latency. Also FTL gives me a stream of RTP packets which can go directly into WebRTC meaning I have to do 0 processing of the packets where as with RTMP I would have to convert them into RTP packets. Also SRT is interesting however it is wildly complicated and does not use RTP meaning I would have to figure out how it works and then convert whatever it gives me into RTP packets for WebRTC

fireattack• 6 years ago

Demo link doesn't work.

GRVYDEV23• 6 years ago

As of right now there isn’t a demo. I need to determine the most cost effective way to stream 24/7 then I will put one up

29athrowaway• 6 years ago

What about a recording of a demo on YouTube?

Tepix• 6 years ago

Related: a fork of OBS Studio with WebRTC support

https://github.com/CoSMoSoftware/OBS-studio-webrtc

campbellmorgan• 6 years ago

For anybody thinking about contributing this, this is sadly as close to not open source as open source gets. I tried to contribute to this, but it's impossible to build without the webrtc binary and the docs are deliberately opaque about going about building your own version of the binary. You are encouraged to pay the (almost sole) contributor of this repo for his build of webrtc. For this reason it's not really surprising that this version is both quite out of sync with the mainline OBS and also has only one or two contributors. Fortunately, for me, most plugins built with the mainline OBS do work with this.

I get that the maintainer has put a lot of work into this and wants to try and monetize some part which is hard when OBS is GPL, but depending on a binary which is nigh-on impossible to build and then charging for it on your website just feels a bit of a shitty way to do it.

orliesaurus• 6 years ago

Very cool - mind showcasing/telling us some use-cases? I'm thinking... if you pair this with a tool to control input (mouse/keyboard) you could have a ligth-fast (pun intended) VNC server with HD resolution?

GRVYDEV23• 6 years ago

Wow that is a use case that I haven’t considered haha! That sounds awesome! This was made with the intent to be used as a traditional live stream server similar to Twitch or YouTube but honestly it can be used for whatever your heart desires :)

gzer0• 6 years ago

Hmm, how would you go about doing that though? Would that not require admin/highest level privileges?

matsemann• 6 years ago

Very cool!

If you want casual people to use this, I would look into simplifying the setup. Either by providing compiled binaries instead of having to set up go, rust etc oneself. Or by containerizing something.

reactspa• 6 years ago

a Docker-Compose recipe would be very welcome.

GRVYDEV23• 6 years ago

This is planned and will hopefully be coming soon :)

GRVYDEV23• 6 years ago

I’d love to write an installer that would install and run everything for you

prox• 6 years ago

Another vote for some kind of deployment system, that would rock.

te_chris2• 6 years ago

Could this mix multiple obs streams from different origins? My friends and I put on a NYE stream party but it was actually a massive faff finding something that could mix multiple remote streams into one. Would love to be able to self host something to do it

A simple switch is fine in this case, no overlays or anything

corobo2• 6 years ago

Obs-ndi. Output all the sources you need over NDI. Use them as sources in OBS.

naikrovek6• 6 years ago

NDI is exactly right. It was designed for that.

te_chris2• 6 years ago

Is there some easy to run server software for this? Looks interesting but seems to only run on obs desktop?

woodrowbarlow2• 6 years ago

i've dabbled in OBS' code and actually this should be possible. you might need to modify the "Media Source" element to add the GUI controls for FTL-specific stuff, but all the protocol support seems to already be in there and the actual media transport is RTP, which is already supported because the Media Source supports RTMP streams.

you'd have each of your different origins stream to their own private FTL paths, then in your OBS you'd create media sources from each of those paths then push your final, mixed stream to the public FTL path.

867-5309• 6 years ago

OBS: Open Broadcaster Software

j1elo7• 6 years ago

About the choice of license (MIT): could you share your considerations about it? (if any)

It's a topic I'm interested in. Mainly to see examples (and learn from them) about when people prefer lax licenses on the style of "do what you want with this, including a closed-source proprietary business" (MIT, Apache) which has allowed in the past that big Co's. benefit from it without giving back (lots of cases in HN), vs. strong copyleft "do what you want except closed-source proprietary stuff" style (generally speaking, the GPL family -- EDIT: I know that this, being mainly a server-side thing, would be more affected by AGPL than by GPL. Bear with me.).

If there are no business / commercialization intentions in the foreseeable future, would it make sense to use a GPL license (one of them) to build a strong open-source community?

Or it doesn't matter in practice? (i.e. it doesn't really affect the chances of building a good and strong developer community)

GRVYDEV23• 6 years ago

Would I like a strong open source community? Absolutely, could you fork this and make money off of it right now? No not even close. Maybe in the future I would consider a different license but at the end of the day if you take this and make it profitable good for you :) my goal wasn’t to make money

naikrovek6• 6 years ago

I am also pro-MIT. For me, "freedom" doesn't mean "restricting what users can do."

GPL restricts what users can do, and thus restricts freedom in my eyes.

Not sure why anyone would care but it seemed like a good time to explain my thoughts on that while agreeing with you.

This kind of thing has been needed for some time, so thank you for creating it.

j1elo7• 6 years ago

Thanks!

As I said, I'm not trying to push for this or that license, just want to have a perspective of the choice for new OSS projects.

Mostly the usual lesson is that authors typically don't really think through much about the licensing choice when they are hyped about an upcoming first release. Technical concerns are, understandably, what gets most attention at the beginning. Your position is the most common one I've found for small-ish projects.

xmodem• 6 years ago

This is awesome and I'm going to try to set it up.

Is it possible for a viewer of the stream to send it to a Chromecast?

xeyownt• 6 years ago

Bugs: "I am very from perfect". Pun intended? ;-)

GRVYDEV23• 6 years ago

Oof! I'll stick to development I guess grammar isn't my strong suit haha!

2Gkashmiri• 6 years ago

can this tech be adopted in things like peertube?

cfjgvjh• 6 years ago

This looks fantastic!

We usually use Discord's share screen feature, but having more options are always nice, and I assume I can up the resolution/bitrate as I need since it's based on an OBS stream.

GRVYDEV23• 6 years ago

Yeah! The bitrate shouldn't exceed 8k though and remember the more bitrate you use the more bandwidth the server will use which can mean incurring costs with some providers.

xd19362• 6 years ago

This is fantastic! I needed this yesterday evening while trying to bring a remote family member into a Jackbox game, with no account or software needed on their end. Great project!

lawl2• 6 years ago

This is awesome! I wanted to make something like this too after Mixer shut down and I didn't have good options anymore to stream low latency gameplay to friends. But I was too lazy to do it properly.

I ended up with this hack: https://i.imgur.com/jDeMxly.png

Redirect the "Record" button of obs to make ffmpeg output to an http endpoint, which is a small server that just forwards any bytes it receives to connected consumers. They can then play it back with

    ffplay -fflags nobuffer -flags low_delay -framedrop -strict experimental https://stream.server/lawl

I've found that most of the latency is actually coming from the player. I.e. VLC has way more latency, even if you tell it to not buffer. TCP is a bit of an issue since ffplay doesn't speed up playback when it falls behind, but it mostly works and you can just restart ffplay if you fall behind too far. When it works (good network conditions) it also achieves sub second latency.

Will definitely have to give this a try over my hack.

thedmstdmstdmst2• 6 years ago

What do you use for your small server for forwarding bytes?

lawl2• 6 years ago

https://pastebin.com/iywLhh8Y

Don't expect much. I threw this entire thing together as quickly and lazily as possible.

jedberg• 6 years ago

This looks really cool! Maybe we'll switch over our weekly Jackbox games to this.

What is the relationship between viewers and CPU load? I assume it is not linear? And does it do any sort of bandwidth optimization or is the outbound bandwidth stream size times number of users?

In other words, how many viewers do you think a single DO droplet could handle?

polishdude20• 6 years ago

Any reason you used go and rust rather than node?

Show HN: Lightspeed – subsecond, open source, self hosted stream from OBS

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