Given the recent controversies surrounding Discord and the fact that the end user is a product of Twitch, I wonder if there is any “bare bone” solution to stream my gaming session to a friend who’s on Windows. I’d rather that they didn’t have to do anything except clicking on a link or perhaps installing a piece of software but with no need to do any configuration. From their perspective, it should "just work.

On my side
Should I set up a webserver into which I feed an OBS stream? Or can perhaps ffmpeg work as a server on it’s own? I’m on Arch Linux, playing games on Steam, within dwm within X11.

On my friend’s side
No idea how a windows user is supposed to receive such a video feed.

Edit: text and voice chat, we’re considering Signal for.

  • onlinepersona@programming.dev
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    4 days ago

    TL; DR use Jami

    You want something to stream low latency, don’t you? Honestly, that means peer to peer, not centralised (I. E streaming to a server which then streams to your friend). OBS will use large buffers (multiple seconds) that are then sent out to the server.

    I would suggest using Jami. It’s peer to peer chat with peer to peer video and audio calls. It’s the simplest solution I’ve found. Matrix has MatrixRTC (or whatever they call it) but you will need the Element client and will need to activate RTC in the “labs”. Not sure if it’s in the stable build or the beta.

    Signal can also stream peer to peer (webrtc like every other) but it compresses a lot and encrypts on top of it. You could have low latency but you will have visual artefacts and there’s no way to tweak the settings.