I just did something really cool!

So it's currently 3 AM and I've spent last night and today working on this to cope with a stressful situation I was in. Autistic hyperfixation does wonders in a slump. Anyway, announcing the Eircast!

This is something I've setup using Owncast, an open source self-hosted stream service. I can't exactly show you in this post because it's something I give out whenever I use it. Essentially, I can stream from OBS to this Owncast instance, and have it hosted on my site in a secret domain only accessible with a randomized access key. It's different every time I stream. Then, I can give a link to my friends, and they can immediately tune in!

Why am I doing this? Because currently, Vesktop isn't able to perform hardware acceleration for streams on Linux if using an NVidia card. This has been a huge detriment for me as I've found out my streams are nigh unwatchable by my friends. There's constant lag, low quality, freezing, and stuttering. Movies are out of the question.

After some testing tonight, the Eircast works fantastically! The only downside currently is that the stream won't be synced up as well as Discord's, so my friends' reactions are going to be quite delayed... For the most part it should be fine, but as soon as I'm actually trying to point something out in real time, it becomes a problem.

I have the chat disabled currently. I figured it'd be too much overhead, and it'd be too much work for me to see the chat while I'm streaming stuff. The idea of a chat, including with emote support, is appealing, though, it's just that I'm only using this for Discord streams. I don't exactly care about having an audience.

The system has 3 parts: The owncast service itself, the nginx and php setup I made to conceal it behind a key, and the bash scripts I use to generate a new key. When I run my script, a short random key is generated and copied over a text file on the server. The nginx+php system I set up reads from this text file and confirms that the key is present at the end of the accessing URI. If so, authorization is granted and my friends can watch my stream. Finally, the bash script on my own machine generates a link to my stream and immediately copies it to my clipboard, so I can send it straight to my friends.

This has encouraged me to play with OBS too, which I never really did before... I downloaded an input display plugin because I just can't get enough of input displays, I think they're so neat... I'm interested in playing with this purely for fun, not out of wanting to become a streamer or anything, but how cool would it be if I had a little be right back screen or a little talking pngtuber of my fursona in the corner... mmmmmmhhh...