Flirting with Owncast, Raspberry Pi and OBS - Adventure in Self Hosing

bcoyle

bcoyle

Member
Owncast is an environment similar to youtube etc, just not as well known. There is no censorship and you are pretty much allowed to have you own channel with your own stuff. But, You should still pay attention to copyright laws.

Owncast has a central directory where other people have their channels and live broadcasts are highlighted. It has chat etc.

There are many solutions in the cloud, but can be costly if you use a lot of bandwidth. Also, you don't want to store a lot of videos there either.

So this is an experiment in self hosting.
Owncast has downloadable software that runs on a PI and make it pretty easy to get started.


Of course, upload speed is important, so you need good upload speeds to make this work.

So wish me luck and join in the adventure if interested.
 
Last edited:
bcoyle

bcoyle

Member
Step 2. Got the PI today - Put it together.
I got a pi 5, 8gb ram, 128gb sd card with preloaded OS.
The instructions were printed very small. Had to use a magnetizing glass.
Went to the god of all knowledge to help for a few details.
Plugged the power supply in, got a green light.
Connected a monitor, mouse,keyboard.
Came up alright.
Created account, password
selected english, timezone and browser type.
Connected the lan cable.
browser worked fine
I am totally impressed

IT IS SO TINY!
 
bcoyle

bcoyle

Member
So, why should you care about this forum channel?
So far, i've gotten a few views, but not enough interest to anybody to join.

So this would be of interest to less experienced people, new to cloud and server use.

Of course, it's easy to just say in these times , just go ahead and buy this or that. but truly, if this is a burden finance wise, then hint to the wife or kids, that you might like this as a present on a birthday or Christmas.

Anyway, i recommend buying a kit with pi 5 (not 4) with a full desk top, power supply, cables etc. I payed $130 for my klit (on amazon, came next day) ) with 8gb ram and 128gb main disc. The main disc is really just a big SD card, you might use for cameras. Think windows C drive.This will save you pain and when booting up for the first time. You just connect a usb keyboard and mouse, use the supplied hdmi cable to a monitor. Later , you can remove these and operate it headless (i.e. remotely if you wish.

The pi 5 aleady has a firefox and chrome brower installed along with a VCN server for remote operation. It truly has everything. The operating system is a denian 12 linux system. It also has a wireless connection along with a wired cat input. It truly is just a small form factor computer.
 
bcoyle

bcoyle

Member
So I started with a youtube video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0BWc8TF0qI0

This is a video on setup / install of owncast on a pi.
It talks about what you need to know to get this going.
In the first part of the video he talks about flashing a new system on sd card.
I avoided this by buying a full kit with installed OS , PS, cables, box etc. Don't go cheap.

Please realize, even if I am talking about owncast, a lot of this also applies to other server types.

Since I got the full kit, I looked at the documentation first. I have old eyes, so needed a magnifying glass to view some of the diagrams.
The kit came with a pi pc board, a cooler fan and a box that I had to put together. Not hard.
Once assembled, I plugged in the power supply cable, the ubs keyboard and mouse. They suppled 2 hdmi cables, plugged one into a spare monitor. All this made it easy to deal with the pi for the first time. You can remove this later and talk to the pi remotely if you like.

On startup, the pi asks you a few questions about names, browser types etc.

To talk to the pi remotely , i downed loaded 2 programs to my main computer. They are both free. Google them to find the install pages

1. Putty: Creates a command window.
2 Realvnc LITE. This lets you do a remote desktop login. Be sure to get the LITE version which is free while the regualr version is not.


The video will fill you in with some of the details about installing the owncast server.

Th raspberry pi becomes just another computer on your local network with an address that looks like 192.168.1.x where x is a number assigned by your router on startup. Hopefully the same each time.
 
bcoyle

bcoyle

Member
Now a server is just a piece of software sitting a on a computer somewhere "LISTENING" on a port. You can talk to it by specifying the computer address 192.168.1.x and the port number. This address works well if you are talking on the local network using your browser. The x is whatevery the routewr assigned to the PI.

So lets say, your pi has an address of 168.192.1.17. Once the owncast server is running, it will respond to you (using a browser) with different commands.

If yiou know how to stream to youtube, owncast is similar. It has a target address and a stream key. For owncast, you are using the internal network address not the youtube address in the clouds.

So to stream to owncast , you need to edit obs stream setting.. FYI: in the owncast setup (remember the video), you created a stream key, yourself. This is needed to stream to owncast.

So the target owncast server is custom, rtmp://192.168.1.17:1935/live and the stream key is the one you created. Easy enough. Port 1935 is the port that the owncast server is listening on for you to stream to, while port 8080 is the port where you can watch the video.

One VERY IMPORTANT thing to remember is HOW MUCH UP BANDWITH do you have. For each user logged on, you are using your home bandwidth. Now I am lucky and have 400 up / down, so can support a number of users depending on my video bit rate. Owncast also has videos on how to install a server on a free (within reason) LINODE cloud account. There are limits on the stream data you can send without paying for extra, But you get a free permanent internet address.
 
bcoyle

bcoyle

Member
On my home computer, I can use a browser and watch the streaming video on 192.16.1.x:8080 by just typing in that ip address and port 8080. You could have the PI connect to you local TV and have it wirelessly and have you own private tv STREAMING channel (WITHOUT SENSORSHIP).

So great, you can stream to you local computer or tv set

What about the outside world????
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Top