John Riselvato

Before working on the FFmpeg For Beginners Book, the experience I had with streaming with FFmpeg was zero but I reached out to the FFmpeg community and everyone was saying I needed to cover this topic. Fortunately for me, streaming is actually way easier than I was expecting.

First go to https://www.youtube.com and click the create a video button and select the ‘Go Live’ option from the drop down, as seen in figure 109.0:

Select ‘New Stream’ and fill out the desired title, description, etc. Next, select ‘Create Stream’. As seen in figure 109.1:

Tip: Make sure the ‘webcam’ option isn’t selected but ‘stream’ is. 

Tip: Actually… if you’d rather stream the webcam directly from YouTube, it’s probably easier than using FFmpeg.

YouTube will now wait for the stream data to hit the YouTube server. Before data can be sent the URL and Key must be set to send data over rtmp. In short, the Real-Time Messaging Protocol is a stream protocol and the only one YouTube supports.

The current screen has these two variables available at the bottom left corner, as seen in figure 109.2:

Keep these two variables around as they’ll be used in the following questions for streaming to YouTube.

To ensure the stream is working, keep this window open to see a preview but to go live, the ‘Go Live’ button must be clicked. Once live, the live chat will be available and you’re ready to communicate with your fan base.

Now you are ready to stream to YouTube.

Part 2: (FFMPEG) HOW TO STREAM A FILE TO YOUTUBE?