Livepeer Broadcaster

Introduction

This page gives an introduction to Livepeer Broadcaster.

Livepeer is a project to create a decentralised public network providing video infrastructure services, based on open-source software. (Livepeer on github), (Livepeer Primer).

The main objective is to help you install and operate a Broadcaster on a computer, and to learn how to interact with it.

Overview

Livepeer Broadcaster is software to run on a computer or a server. It uses entirely open-source and freely available software.

A Livepeer Broadcaster can receive and serve streaming content. It can also be configured to transcode streaming content to improve accessibility of content.

The streaming content must be Video + Audio, and must be published into the Broadcaster in a linear stream. Content can be live (from camera and microphone) and / or recorded (from a disk).

It can receive streaming content published in RTMP format, from tools like OBS Studio, ManyCam, FFmpeg, or many other rtmp software libraries and tools.

It can serve streaming content over http with a .m3u8 extension, for playback in tools like VLC Media Player, media-enabled Mobile browsers (Brave, Firefox or Chrome), embedded in an html page using a stream player such as hls.js, or inside a mobile application using something like ExoPlayer.

Minimum Setup

Here are instructions to setup a Livepeer Broadcaster on a local computer. They will work on Mac or Linux.

1. Download the latest release of pre-compiled software from Livepeer's Release Page on Github, under where it says Assets:

• On a Mac, download the livepeer-darwin-amd64.tar.gz file of the livepeer-darwin-arm64.tar.gz file to the Downloads folder

• On Linux, download the livepeer-linux-amd64.tar.gz file

2. Unzip the file:

• On Mac, simply open the file, and it will extract to the folder containing the file (Downloads).

• On Linux, open the livepeer-linux-amd64.tar.gz file then click "Extract", and extract it to "Home".

3. Open Terminal, and navigate to the folder containing the livepeer binary:

• On Mac, run cd Downloads/livepeer-darwin-amd64 or cd Downloads/livepeer-darwin-arm64

• On Linux, run cd livepeer-linux-amd64

4. Run ./livepeer -broadcaster

5. Wait until the text Video Ingest Endpoint - rtmp://127.0.0.1:1935 is displayed.

Livepeer Broadcaster is now running.

Next Steps

Now that Livepeer Broadcaster is running, here are some further things you can do:

• Publish to, and Consume from a Livepeer Broadcaster

• Learn more about how Livepeer Broadcaster works

• Add Transcoding to increase accessibility of streaming content

• Build a hosted instance of Livepeer Broadcaster

• Configure Livepeer Broadcaster to start on system boot

• Build from source code