RASPBERRY Pi STREAMING

Camera-shy Jonni Bidwell conquers his fears as he harnesses the power of OBS Studio to stream live to his, er, three followers.

- Jonni Bidwell

Being an online broadcaster has been a legitimate profession for some years. But the pandemic fuelled a surge in aspiring home streamers. And despite the ongoing relaxation of measures, the home streaming wave shows no sign of breaking. Whether it’s repairing washing machines on YouTube, playing Doom on Twitch or just ranting on Facebook Live, there’s abundant diversity in the things people are broadcasting, and tuning into. Setting up a professional recording studio at home is an expensive undertaking, but you really don’t need any fancy hardware at all to get started. Many a YouTuber started out using just their laptops.

Software-wise, the open source OBS Studio is by far the most popular choice. It provides an intuitive interface that makes it easy to manipulate scenes and add effects during recording. And it can stream to all the most popular platforms (as well as a whole bunch we’d never heard of, and some we could have done without hearing about). We’ll show you how to get the most out of that and start broadcasting to the world. You can even run it on a Raspberry Pi, and it works great in tandem with the Pi Foundation’s High-Quality Camera.

But why stop there. Thanks to Own cast, it’s remarkably easy to self-host your streaming. All you need is enough bandwidth to support your audience. With even a modestly fast upload speed you’ll be able to host a few dozen viewers. And if you don’t then take Own cast off-world and run it on a virtual private server. As long as your stream can get from OBS to Own cast smoothly, then the mass transport all takes place in the cloud.

Streaming basics

The hardware and infrastructure you’ll need to get your stream live.