Ghostream

Boooo! A simple streaming server with authentication and open-source technologies.

This project was developped at Cr@ns to stream events.

Features:

• WebRTC playback with a lightweight web interface.
• SRT stream input, supported by FFMpeg, OBS and Gstreamer.
• Low-latency streaming, sub-second with web player.
• Authentication of incoming stream using LDAP server.
• Possibility to forward stream to other streaming servers.

Installation on Debian/Ubuntu

You need at least libsrt 1.4.1. On Ubuntu 20.04 or Debian Buster, you may manually install libsrt-openssl-dev then libsrt-openssl-dev.

You may clone this repository, then go run main.go for debugging, or go get gitlab.crans.org/nounous/ghostream.

Installation with Docker

An example is given in docs/docker-compose.yml. It uses Traefik reverse proxy.

You can also launch the Docker image using,

docker build . -t ghostream
docker run -it --rm -p 2112:2112 -p 9710:9710/udp -p 8080:8080 -p 10000-10005:10000-10005/udp ghostream

Streaming

As stated by OBS wiki, when streaming you should adapt the latency to 2.5 * (the round-trip time with server, in μs).

With OBS

As OBS uses FFMpeg, you need to have FFMpeg compiled with SRT support. To check if SR is available, run ffmpeg -protocols | grep srt. On Windows and MacOS, OBS comes with his own FFMpeg that will work.

In OBS, go to "Settings" -> "Stream" and change "Service" to "Custom..." and "Server" to srt://127.0.0.1:9710?streamid=demo:demo.

With GStreamer

To stream X11 screen,

gst-launch-1.0 ximagesrc startx=0 show-pointer=true use-damage=0 \
! videoconvert \
! x264enc bitrate=32000 tune=zerolatency speed-preset=veryfast byte-stream=true threads=1 key-int-max=15 intra-refresh=true ! video/x-h264, profile=baseline, framerate=30/1 \
! mpegtsmux \
! srtserversink uri=srt://127.0.0.1:9710/ latency=1000000 streamid=demo:demo

Playing stream

With a web browser and WebRTC

Ghostream expose a web server on 0.0.0.0:8080 by default. By opening this in a browser, you will be able to get instructions on how to stream, and if you append /streamname to the URL, then you will be able to watch the stream named streamname.

The web player also integrates a side widget that is configurable.

With ffplay

You may directly open the SRT stream with ffplay:

ffplay -fflags nobuffer srt://127.0.0.1:9710?streamid=demo

Troubleshooting

ld returns an error when launching ghostream

When using libsrt-gnutls-dev rather than libsrt-openssl-dev on Debian/Ubuntu, then srtgo package is unable to build.

~/ghostream$ go run main.go
# github.com/haivision/srtgo
/usr/bin/ld: cannot find -lsrt
/usr/bin/ld: cannot find -lsrt
/usr/bin/ld: cannot find -lsrt
collect2: error: ld returned 1 exit status

The solution is to switch to libsrt-openssl-dev.

References

• Phil Cluff (2019), Streaming video on the internet without MPEG.
• MDN web docs, Signaling and video calling.
• WebRTC For The Curious
• OBS Wiki, Streaming With SRT Protocol.