DIY Film Festival

aka

Pirate Television

What if you could program your own film festival? Always been into pirate TV? The contents of this repository contain a lot of instructions to tie together (mostly) free services and a little website to give to an audience. The website will look like Twitch with a live video player and a groupchat.

The primary motivation is because Twitch lawyers appear to have decided it's time to enforce content policies, now that quarentine is over for most of us. The intended audience are people who do not identify as "coders". There will be a requirement to modify some HTML, which isn't really code but might look a little unusual if you haven't seen it before. Don't worry, it's easy. Without further interruption...

HWG

This will require a minimum of five (5) different accounts on four services. So it's definitely some assembly required, thus the name DIY Film Festival.

1. Github account.
2. Account on ok.ru. You don't even need an email address by default, just a phone number for an SMS verification. Feels shady but it's probably fine.
3. Account on restream.io. If you have a Google or Facebook account you can use one of those.
4. restream.io's default ok.ru integration.
5. Account with minnit.chat

The good news is most of these are free. They are also easy to use.

Hosting

This is where your website will live and where you can make changes to it. I recommend the free option but if you want to pay some money, there's a subscription option too.

Github Pages (zero dollars)

Github is a platform used by software engineers to develop code collaboratively. It also can host websites, neat! Here's how to set one up. Jargon Watch: a repo is what you are looking at right now. forking a repo is what you are about to do. It's a fancy way of making a copy with a reference back to the original.

1. Create an account on Github.
2. Fork this repository by clicking the icon that says fork.
3. When you see a screen looking similar to this one, click the little gear that says Settings.
4. In the left menu that says Code and automation, click Pages.
5. Under Source, from the pulldown select main and click Save.
6. After a moment there should be a link to a URL where you can view this website, like, right now. This DNS name will end in github.io which is something we can change later.

If you're curious, jump ahead and read the docs for more info on how DNS in Pages works,

Squarespace (non-zero dollars)

Squarespace seems to be popular and advertises on broadcast television so there's a non-zero chance you've heard of it before. I haven't used it so can't be the best voice here. The website says it features award winning templates if you're into that kind of thing. Perhaps someone else can write up Squarespace docs.

Video Streaming

This part is the most confusing to me but don't worry I hope to cover everything. A video stream from your own humble computer into the mass we call The Cloud is a twisty path. There are multiple stops along the way. Here they are.

Audience delivery with ok.ru (zero dollars)

Ok dot ru is a Russian social network like Facebook. It has a live video streaming feature which doesn't seem to have any limits on how many users can view an embedded video. CathodeTV regurarly has > 100 viewers! Neat!

1. Create an account on ok.ru
2. Go to the live broadcast section. It will be blank until you complete the next step. Keep it open because you'll need to get some information from it later.
3. When the next step is complete come back here and copy the URL from the video that is live. You'll only need the numerical ID, which will be at the end.

Video proxy with Restream.io ( 4 hours a week for zero dollars )

Restream sits between OBS (the source) and the audience delivery. For a considerably higher amount of money, it can also do audience delivery. More on that later. It makes it easy to add a single stream key to OBS in a set-it-and-forget-it way. After that it will rebroadcast (restream, get it?!) to a multitude of other popular platforms like Twitch and Facebook. We're not concerned about these platforms, so we first head to Russia, as described in the preceding chapter.

1. Create an account on restream.io
2. Add the stream key to OBS.
3. After creating an account on ok.ru from the previous chapter
4. Create a destination using the default ok.ru template.
5. Go back to OBS and click Start Streaming in the main window.

At this point you should have the stream flowing. The final step is to update your website to display this stream. TODO: how does cathode get a persistent URL from restream to ok.ru?

Edit the file named index.html (by clicking on the filename and clicking the little pencil icon) in this repository so the link at the bottom where it says VIDEO STREAMING to match the numerical ID of the live broadcast on ok.ru live page.

Audience delivery with restream.io (100 dollars every month)

For the fee of $100 a month (that's $1200 a year!) Restream will give you the privilege of embedding a player in your own website for unlimited hours of streaming. This removes ok.ru from the picture. There is currently no speculation that Restream will do any content policing or enforcement.

Video encoding with OBS (free and open)

OBS is the client application used to encode an image from your computer and sent it to a streaming service.

Use the default restream.io stream destination

• Settings => Stream => Service = Restream.io
• Enter the stream key you obtained from Restream. Leave the Server to the default
• Settings => Output => Video Bitrate = 5000
• Add VLC Video Source under Sources, add files to the playlist.
• Move to the next chapter.

OBS is capable of a lot more but this isn't a tutorial to use OBS. Some interesting plugins for the programmer types are obs-cli and obs-websocket

Group Chat

• Create an account on minnit.chat
• For the sake of getting started quickly, use the "classic" chat
• look at the URL for your new chat, the author's is https://minnit.chat/diyfilmfestival
• copy this URL
• Search for the string GROUPCHAT in the file index.html and modify it with your chat's name, keeping the remaining parts of the URL.

DNS

Domain Name System is how people can have custom names online like example.com. It's very likely you're looking for a custom name. In case you aren't, the following is the default for Github Pages.

Default Name with Github Pages (zero dollars)

If you don't care about a URL ending in github.io, you can keep the default from the tutorial. For example, the author's is http://lazzarello.github.io

Custom DNS with name dot com (variable pricing)

• Purchase a name on name.com
• Depending on the name you want to register and the availability, this runs about $15 a year for a dot com.
• Go into the DNS records section to prepare to add the custom name information
• Follow the instructions below to make a subdomain like stream.example.com
• If you want an "apex domain" like example.com there is another section in the Github docs

Post the instructions from Github Pages for custom DNS.

Add a custom domain name to Github Pages

1. Add a domain (more on this in the DNS chapter) through Settings => Pages => Add a domain
2. Type a domain where you can read and write records. Jump ahead to the DNS section if you don't know how to do this.
3. Follow the instructions on the screen to add the required records to your name host.
4. Click Verify. The warning that it may take 24 hours was not relevant for my first attempt. It took about 5 minutes.

Read the docs for more info on how DNS in Pages works, if you're curious

Does this sound too boring to you?

It's also possible to set all this up yourself on a self-hosted cloud platform. Read more about it in the BACKEND and NOTES files. I got started myself on a Google Cloud Platform account I had previously set up with this tutorial. It's a straight forward process if you have the experience with Linux servers. The bandwidth cost is ~ US $30 a month for about 100 users at 1.4 mbit/s. lower bitrates could be cheaper and/or have higher user counts.

https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-set-up-a-video-streaming-server-using-nginx-rtmp-on-ubuntu-20-04

Shout outs to

• EffieVision
• Spectacle Theater
• CathodeTV
• Fort90 Film Club
• Museum of Home Video
• Effed Up Film Heads
• Hollywood Entertainment (fka Moviepass)
• Miss Molly Rogers
• Unlimited Hangouts
• Piss Hospital
• Sicko Vision
• BGCozyCave

TODO

[ ] debug that weird problem where the transport stream in the playlist would end in .t and break the CORS policy, then with no intervention of my own changed to .ts which applys the CORS defined in the plugin [] Cloud automation to manage the instances nginx configuration [] DNS for broadcast server IP [] DASH is either broken or shouldn't be used [ ] Cloud automation to create the instances and associated infrastructure [] javascript Player is basically just the defaults [ ] output rtmp stats via nginx plugin [ ] log rtmp access/error [ ] remote control OBS with fancy web UI [ ] Add some stream token authentication system so randos online can't play the stream. Or not... [ ] SSL via Let's Encrypt [ ] client scaling via load balancer or CDN [ ] fastly [ ] cloudflare