Note to Mac users: You can install nginx with the RTMP module via Homebrew: If you want to use Windows, you can find Windows binaries for nginx with the RTMP module already included here:

Note to Windows users: This guide focuses on using Linux. As long as you get the dependencies for nginx somewhere besides apt, you can follow this guide just fine. I recommend using Ubuntu for the server software for the sake of ease, but you can obviously use whatever you want. So when I have 2 streamers stream to my server, and I download both of them, I can chew up 10GB of bandwidth in 2 hours. Just make sure you have enough bandwidth.remember that bandwidth usage will be (the size of a stream) * (the number of people uploading + the number of people downloading). I recommend Linode or Digital Ocean as providers. If you don't have your own box, a VPS can also work. So I assure you, even a cheap old box would suffice. Don't believe me? My RTMP server for a long time was a Raspberry Pi, a $35 mini-computer, sitting under my desk, and it was capable of hosting at least 3 simultaneous streams, and I never even stressed it to see how many more it could handle. Essentially it just grabs data from the input and forwards it on to the output, simple data transfer.

Import other people's streams to incorporate for your own purposes (I use it in my casts for multiple camera angles, like in this video I did of a Tribes Ascend broadcast with multiple camera angles)Īlright, so how do you do these kinds of things?īelieve it or not, RTMP is actually extremely light on system resources.

Don't worry, it's not too complicated, but having familiarity with Linux will certainly help.Ī couple things you can do with your own RTMP server that you might be interested in: This guide will cover the very basics of setting up a simple RTMP server on a Linux computer. But sometimes you want some more control over your stream, or you want other people to be able to stream to you, or you want to stream to multiple places, or any number of things that requires you to have access to an actual RTMP stream from an RTMP server. Most people who stream enjoy using services such as or Ustream to deliver video to viewers, and that works well enough.

Setup a red5 rtmp server