Take control over your content and stream it yourself.
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Table of Contents

• About the Project
• Getting Started
• Use with your broadcasting software
• Building from source
• Contributing
• License
• Contact

About The Project

Owncast is an open source, self-hosted, decentralized, single user live video streaming and chat server for running your own live streams similar in style to the large mainstream options. It offers complete ownership over your content, interface, moderation and audience. Visit the demo for an example.

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Getting Started

The goal is to have a single service that you can run and it works out of the box. Visit the Quickstart to get up and running.

Use with your existing broadcasting software

In general Owncast is compatible with any software that uses RTMP to broadcast to a remote server. RTMP is what all the major live streaming services use, so if you’re currently using one of those it’s likely that you can point your existing software at your Owncast instance instead.

OBS, Streamlabs, Restream and many others have been used with Owncast. Read more about compatibility with existing software.

Building from Source

Backend

The Owncast backend is a service written in Go.

1. Ensure you have the gcc compiler installed.
2. Install the Go toolchain (1.16 or above).
3. Clone the repo. git clone https://github.com/owncast/owncast
4. go run main.go will run from source.
5. Visit http://yourserver:8080 to access the web interface or http://yourserver:8080/admin to access the admin.
6. Point your broadcasting software at your new server and start streaming.

There is also a supplied Dockerfile so you can spin it up from source with little effort. Read more about running from source.

Frontend

The Owncast Web Frontend is a React application that is worked on seperately from the backend. Visit the web readme for details.

Contributing

Owncast is a growing open source project that is giving freedom, flexibility and fun to live streamers. And while we have a small team of kind, talented and thoughtful volunteers, we have gaps in our skillset that we’d love to fill so we can get even better at building tools that make a difference for people.

We abide by our Code of Conduct and feel strongly about open, appreciative, and empathetic people joining us. We’ve been very lucky to have this so far, so maybe you can help us with your skills and passion, too!

There is a larger, more detailed, and more up-to-date guide for helping contribute to Owncast on our website.

Architecture

Owncast consists of two repositories with two standalone projects. The repo you're looking at now is the core repository with the backend and frontend.

Suggestions when working with the Owncast codebase

1. Install golangci-lint for helpful warnings and suggestions directly in your editor when writing Go.
2. If using VSCode install the lit-html extension to aid in syntax highlighting of our frontend HTML + Preact.
3. Run the project with go run main.go.

License

Distributed under the MIT License. See LICENSE for more information.

Contact

Project chat: Join us on Rocket.Chat if you want to contribute, follow along, or if you have questions.

Gabe Kangas - @gabek@fosstodon.org - email gabek@real-ity.com

Project Link: https://github.com/owncast/owncast