Making this a new top-level reply so its easier to find/see.
Summary
For a pre-release this is awesome! I've been contemplating the idea of self-hosting streaming since trying out zap.stream last year and this is absolutely a viable replacement.
I tried to organize my notes and thoughts as best I could; let me know if you need clarification on anything.
Docker host
- VM on Proxmox 9
- 2 cores of a Xeon E5-1630 v3, 4GB RAM
- Ubuntu Server LTS 24.04
- Separate Caddy container handling HTTPS/LetsEncrypt
- sharing Docker host with 4 other containers, mostly idle
- No performance issues.
System / Technical
- Setup was flawless except for FFmpeg missing (partly my fault for missing the requirement in the docs). Ended up having to build it in the Dockerfile without librtmp; error messages were vague but indicated an incompatibility with something in gnostream.
- RTMP stream key support will be a must for both general security and compatibility with some streaming tools (more on this in the UI / UX section).
- An admin interface of some kind for updating stream info would be nice, especially for those using Docker (its a pain to edit files directly inside containers). Though this would come with its own security load, so making it optional / separate / community-provided may be the better choice.
- Was able to stream from OBS on Windows and a sketchy app on iOS, and watch live and archives on the website on Windows (Firefox) and iOS (Orion).
- Was able to see Nostr stream events in noStrudel (Windows, Firefox). Haven't found or tested any Nostr clients for iOS that support NIP-53 events (I will admit I didn't look very hard...)
UI / UX
- OBS is the gold standard for desktop streaming and handles no auth with a simple checkbox, but all but one (sketchy) iOS app I tried required a stream key. I don't know how common streaming from mobile is (or whether the Android ecosystem is different), but I'd highly recommend adding stream key support.
- Much of the black-on-green text on the website is difficult to see. Inspector shows it as "cyan" and "green", but its displaying as black, and I couldn't find what was overriding it.
- The shimmer effect across the site runs over-top of the video window; not sure how big of a pain it would be to get it to run behind.
- Both the Data Vault and Recent Transmission section on the Live Feed page feel unwieldy to browse; auto-shrinking or capping the size of the video thumbnails would solve this.
- Some users may want archived / saved streams auto-posted to their Blossom server and/or as a simple link in a Kind-1 event, though given the file size of a longer stream Blossom may not be viable.
- The ability to export saved streams as single video files would be nice to have (admin only).
- Direct links for archived streams would be nice to have.
- The option to also post a Kind-1 event with a simple link to the stream would be nice to have. Would be awesome if the links used the stream thumbnail as their thumbnail (instead of the page/site preview) (I'm pretty sure there's some web magic that can achieve this, but it's been a while since I used it.)
- The play window for archived streams opening at the bottom of the Data Vault page is awkward; unsure if this is a bug or intentional.
- A super-simplified UI mode for the website that doubles as a template hosters can use to make their own custom UI? The webdevs among us could easily customize the current one, but having a simplified template would help encourage the up-and-coming webdevs to do so.
