owncast is a self-hosted live video and web chat server that can be used with most popular broadcasting programs
Recently the release of the new version of the project Owncast 0.1.0 was announced, which is an application that is developed as a server to organize the video transmission and a chat server with the audience.
owncast offers several features, the main one being self-hosting from a real-time audio and video streaming server on a server. This server is installed with a customizable web interface (in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript) featuring a video player and customizable online chat (custom emoticons, chatbots, etc.).
About Owncast
owncast is compatible with streaming software such as OBS Studio and hosting providers External such as AWS or Cloudflare, the transmission is done through the RTMP protocol. The software is primarily developed with the Typescript and Go programming languages, but your proficiency is not required to install and use it.
owncast any software compatible with the RTMP protocol can be used to transfer video to server, such as OBS, Streamlabs, Restream, Zoom and Jitsi.
Live streaming is also possible with video capture from a webcam or HDMI port using FFMpeg. The server receives the original video stream, converts it according to the settings, and segments it for transmission to end users using the HLS (HTTP Live Streaming) protocol.
It is possible to generate several streams with different quality and adaptive bitrate transfer. To optimize bandwidth, video can be served to users using Amazon S3-compatible storage services as intermediaries.
Main news of Owncast 0.1.0
The new version of Owncast 0.1.0 stands out for the complete rewrite of the frontend code responsible for displaying the web interface. With this, it is highlighted that the new interface was made noticeably fasterBest suited for mobile devices, it supports embedding your Javascript code and provides options to customize the style and layout.
Another change that stands out is that participants have the opportunity to change their color in the chat, plus the web source code is no longer included in releases, as well as whate some admin pages have been merged and some urls have changed. In particular, it is recommended to review the "General" and "Server Settings" pages to find additional sections such as S3 Object Storage and custom CSS.
Of the other changes that stand out from this new version:
- Allow upload custom emoji via admin
- Option to mute embed by default
- Support for arbitrary Javascript on the page
- Automatically generate a complex stream key by adding
- Allow to provide HTML instead of a link for external actions
- Stream Title Change Webhook
- Feature Request: Sortable Social Media Links
- Ability to edit external actions
- Implement WCAG 2.1 compliance
- Supports brotli encoding
- Removed Twitter notification support
Of the plans for the future, it is highlighted that it is possible to create federated networks from disparate servers, a single communication structure in which is formed by using the ActivityPub protocol suite. It is also planned to add support for replaying previously completed streams and scheduling streams.
Finally If you are interested in knowing more about it, You should know that the server runs on the user's computer, and unlike Twitch, Facebook Live, and YouTube Live, it allows you to fully control the streaming process and set your own rules for chatting. The management and interaction with users is done through the web interface. The project code is written in Go and is distributed under the MIT license.
You can check the details in the following link.
Download and install owncast
For those interested in being able to install owncast on their system, it is enough to open a terminal and in it they will type the following command:
curl -s https://owncast.online/install.sh | bash
You can consult the user manual and learn more about how to configure owncast, in the following link