Streaming basics
The hardware and infrastructure you’ll need to get your stream live.
Adam Curtis’s seminal 2002 documentary The Century of the Self highlighted how rampant consumerism in the West, driven by careful marketing, has engendered a society focused on the individual. Curtis’s production was prescient, given that the decade that followed saw the rise of social media, selfies and targeted advertising. And in the past decade we’ve seen this appeal to the ego used to direct not just purchases, but politics too. We offer no salve for this societal narcissism, and as the old saying goes: if you can’t beat em, write a feature all about live video-streaming.
Well, maybe our list of old sayings suffered a misprint. And just because we’ll show you how to put a camera and a microphone in front of yourself and broadcast signals to the internet at large, it doesn’t mean we want you to become a product-placing, falsehood-selling influencer type. There are plenty already, and we would rather you didn’t contribute to the further erosion of society. Indeed, you could use this power to foster community values instead, sharing arts and crafts and stories of the old country.
Hardware considerations
Whatever you’re planning to broadcast, you’ll probably need a camera and a microphone. Your laptop’s ensemble will be just fine to get started. If the hardware works elsewhere in Linux then it will work on OBS (Open Broadcasting Software) Studio. This gem of open source software is hugely popular, both on Linux and proprietary OSes.
As you get more into this you may want to upgrade hardware. Microphone pops are annoying, and poor lighting makes your skin look bad. For high-quality game streaming you might want a video capture card, if you’re streaming live audio you might want to invest in a mixing desk or better soundcard. If you want to appear super-imposed on a funky backdrop you’ll need a green screen. Basically, there’s no shortage of directions to invest in this field, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves. We still haven’t covered how this streaming thing works.
We looked at OBS Studio back in LXF269 when Nick Peers showed us how to stream our Linux desktops. OBS sends video streams (whether they’re from your desktop, a camera, or the internet) to a streaming platform. This platform (whether it’s YouTube or a server in your basement) sends the stream to viewers, often recompressing it on the fly to accommodate different viewers’ bandwidth situations. So OBS only needs to have sufficient upload bandwith to get the data to the streaming platform, which ought to have more.
Streaming platforms often incorporate some kind of interactivity, such as chat windows, so your viewers can express their approval or otherwise through colourful language and emoji. We’ll see later how to set up our own self-hosted streaming server too, sticking it to the tech giants. But for now let’s turn the page and get started with OBS.