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What is Broadcast Box

Broadcast Box lets you broadcast to others in sub-second time. It was designed to be simple to use and easily modifiable. We wrote Broadcast Box to show off some of the cutting edge tech that is coming to the broadcast space.

Want to contribute to the development of Broadcast Box? See Contributing.

Sub-second Latency

Broadcast Box uses WebRTC for broadcast and playback. By using WebRTC instead of RTMP and HLS you get the fastest experience possible.

Latest in Video Compression

With WebRTC you get access to the latest in video codecs. With AV1 you can send the same video quality with a 50% reduction in bandwidth required.

Broadcast all angles

WebRTC allows you to upload multiple video streams in the same session. Now you can broadcast multiple camera angles, or share interactive video experiences in real time!

Broadcasters provide transcodes

Transcodes are necessary if you want to provide a good experience to all your users. Generating them is prohibitively expensive though, WebRTC provides a solution. With WebRTC users can upload the same video at different quality levels. This keeps things cheap for the server operator and you still can provide the same experience.

Broadcasting for all

WebRTC means anyone can be a broadcaster. With Broadcast Box you could use broadcast software like OBS. However, another option is publishing directly from your browser! Users just getting started with streaming don't need to worry about bitrates, codecs anymore. With one press of a button you can go live right from your browser with Broadcast Box. This makes live-streaming accessible to an entirely new audience.

Peer-to-Peer (if you need it)

With Broadcast Box you can serve your video without a public IP or forwarding ports!

Run Broadcast Box on the same machine that you are running OBS, and share your video with the world! WebRTC comes with P2P technology, so users can broadcast and playback video without paying for dedicated servers. To start the connection users will need to be able to connect to the HTTP server. After they have negotiated the session then NAT traversal begins.

You could also use P2P to pull other broadcasters into your stream. No special configuration or servers required anymore to get sub-second co-streams.

Broadcast Box acts as a SFU. This means that every client connects to Broadcast Box. No direct connection is established between broadcasters/viewers. If you want a direct connection between OBS and your browser see OBS2Browser.

Using

To use Broadcast Box you don't even have to run it locally! A instance of Broadcast Box is hosted at b.siobud.com. If you wish to run it locally skip to Getting Started

Broadcasting

To use Broadcast Box with OBS you must set your output to WebRTC and set a proper URL + Stream Key. You may use any Stream Key you like. The same stream key is used for broadcasting and playback.

Go to Settings -> Stream and set the following values.

Your settings page should look like this:

OBS Stream settings example

OBS by default will have ~2 seconds of latency. If you want sub-second latency you can configure this in Settings -> Output. Set your encoder to x264 and set tune to zerolatency. Your Output page will look like this.

OBS Output settings example

When you are ready to broadcast press Start Streaming and now time to watch!

Broadcasting (GStreamer, CLI)

See the example script here.

Can broadcast gstreamer's test sources, or pulsesrc+v4l2src

Expects gstreamer-1.0, with good,bad,ugly plugins and gst-plugins-rs

Use of example scripts:

# testsrcs
./examples/gstreamer-broadcast.nu http://localhost:8080/api/whip testStream1
# v4l2src
./examples/gstreamer-broadcast.nu http://localhost:8080/api/whip testStream1 v4l2

Playback

If you are broadcasting to the Stream Key StreamTest your video will be available at https://b.siobud.com/StreamTest.

You can also go to the home page and enter StreamTest. The following is a screenshot of OBS broadcasting and the latency of 120 milliseconds observed.

Example have potential latency

Getting Started

Broadcast Box is made up of two parts. The server is written in Go and is in charge of ingesting and broadcasting WebRTC. The frontend is in react and connects to the Go backend. The Go server can be used to serve the HTML/CSS/JS directly. Use the following instructions to build from source or utilize Docker / Docker Compose.

Configuring

Configurations can be made in .env.production, although the defaults should get things going.

Building From Source

Frontend

React dependencies are installed by running npm install in the web directory and npm run build will build the frontend.

If everything is successful, you should see the following:

> broadcast-box@0.1.0 build
> dotenv -e ../.env.production react-scripts build

Creating an optimized production build...
Compiled successfully.

File sizes after gzip:

  53.51 kB  build/static/js/main.12067218.js
  2.27 kB   build/static/css/main.8738ee38.css
...

Backend

Go dependencies are automatically installed.

To run the Go server, run go run . in the root of this project, you should see the following:

2022/12/11 16:02:14 Loading `.env.production`
2022/12/11 16:02:14 Running HTTP Server at `:8080`

To use Broadcast Box navigate to: http://<YOUR_IP>:8080. In your broadcast tool of choice, you will broadcast to http://<YOUR_IP>:8080/api/whip.

Docker

A Docker image is also provided to make it easier to run locally and in production. The arguments you run the Dockerfile with depending on if you are using it locally or a server.

If you want to run locally execute docker run -e UDP_MUX_PORT=8080 -e NAT_1_TO_1_IP=127.0.0.1 -p 8080:8080 -p 8080:8080/udp seaduboi/broadcast-box. This will make broadcast-box available on http://localhost:8080. The UDPMux is needed because Docker on macOS/Windows runs inside a NAT.

If you are running on AWS (or other cloud providers) execute. docker run --net=host -e INCLUDE_PUBLIC_IP_IN_NAT_1_TO_1_IP=yes seaduboi/broadcast-box broadcast-box needs to be run in net=host mode. broadcast-box listens on random UDP ports to establish sessions.

Docker Compose

A Docker Compose is included that uses LetsEncrypt for automated HTTPS. It also includes Watchtower so your instance of Broadcast Box will be automatically updated every night. If you are running on a VPS/Cloud server this is the quickest/easiest way to get started.

export URL=my-server.com
docker-compose up -d

Environment Variables

The backend can be configured with the following environment variables.

Network Test on Start

When running in Docker Broadcast Box runs a network tests on startup. This tests that WebRTC traffic can be established against your server. If you server is misconfigured Broadcast Box will not start.

If the network test is enabled this will be printed on startup

NETWORK_TEST_ON_START is enabled. If the test fails Broadcast Box will exit.
See the README.md for how to debug or disable NETWORK_TEST_ON_START

If the test passed you will see

Network Test passed.
Have fun using Broadcast Box

If the test failed you will see the following. The middle sentence will change depending on the error.

Network Test failed.
Network Test client reported nothing in 30 seconds
Please see the README and join Discord for help

Join the Discord and we are ready to help! To debug check the following.

If you wish to disable the test set the environment variable NETWORK_TEST_ON_START to false.

Design

The backend exposes three endpoints (the status page is optional, if hosting locally).