Every thing you need to know about Owncast

In category: ← Media Streaming / Video Streaming

About Owncast

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.

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More about Owncast

Take control over your content and stream it yourself.
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View Demo · Use Our Server for Testing · FAQ · Report Bug

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.

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

Owncast consists of two projects.

The Owncast backend is written in Go.
The frontend is written in React.

Important note about source code and the develop branch

The develop branch is always the most up-to-date state of development and this may not be what you always want. If you want to run the latest released stable version, check out the tag related to that release. For example, if you'd only like the source prior to the v0.1.0 development cycle you can check out the v0.0.13 tag.

Note: Currently Owncast does not natively support Windows servers. However, Windows Users can use Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL2) to install Owncast. For details visit this document.

Backend

The Owncast backend is a service written in Go.

Ensure you have prerequisites installed.
C compiler, such as GCC compiler or a Musl-compatible compiler
ffmpeg
Install the Go toolchain (1.18 or above).
Clone the repo. git clone https://github.com/owncast/owncast
go run main.go will run from the source.
Visit http://yourserver:8080 to access the web interface or http://yourserver:8080/admin to access the admin.
Point your broadcasting software at your new server and start streaming.

Frontend

The frontend is the web interface that includes the player, chat, embed components, and other UI.

This project lives in the web directory.
Run npm install to install the Javascript dependencies.
Run npm run dev

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.