Free Software for live streaming

[Patrick Ohnewein (FSFE)]

Hi Erik,

On 02.07.20 13:56, Erik Albers wrote:
> there is the interest of a medium-sized German city to stream its city council
> meetings to the internet. They would like to use Free Software, are willing to
> spend some money for it and are looking for help now.
>
> Apparently there is OBS Studio in this area [1]. Theoretically, this could
> also be possible via Big Blue Button [2]? Does anyone here have experience
> with any of the mentioned software or in general with live streaming and Free
> Software and can share recommendations / pitfalls?


About BBB:

In South Tyrol the LUGBZ has supported the Italian Schools (FUSS) with a
BBB installation:

The LUGBZ has published a collection of tutorials for the teachers[1],
but Italian only.

At NOI Techpark we are considering to use BBB as platform for blended
events, like the NOI Hackathons[2]. But we haven't used it yet.
Therefore I cannot share experiences yet.

About OBS Studio:

With OBS Studio we collected some experiences streaming jitsi sessions
to YouTube as live streams. It works very well.

The computer with OBS Studio installed needs to be strong in CPU and
RAM. Very important is also a very good uplink to the Internet!

You need of course cameras streaming video signals to the OBS Studio
machine.

What is even more difficult most of the times, is to get a good audio
quality from the microphones. The question to be answered is: How do you
get the audio stream in good quality into OBS Studio machine?

Last but not least, consider spending the money on the person who will
do a good direction and recording. The director using OBS Studio has to
mix different camera sources, like ambience camera, camera focused on
speakers and slides.

We are evaluating OBS Studio as a possible solution for the SFScon[3]
this year. We foresee the conference to be held in blended mode with
participants at NOI Techpark and others connecting online.

The main difference between BBB and OBS Studio is, that BBB is a
collaboration platform, which allows recording and streaming of the
session as is, OBS Studio is a tool to mix different video and audio
sources to create recordings and streaming with the ability to have
different scenes like speaker video on screen to the slides, etc. not
just a plain recording of a BBB or jitsi session.

Best regards,
Patrick

[1] https://www.lugbz.org/tutorial-bigbluebutton/
[2] https://hackathon.bz.it/
[3] https://www.sfscon.it/

-- 
Patrick Ohnewein
Free Software Foundation Europe - https://fsfe.org


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