Hey!
Alex here from Connectify!
IRL Live Streaming is a lot of fun, but it can be expensive to get the equipment necessary
to keep a stable HD stream going while you’re out and about.
One of the most popular pieces of hardware for this (and on the low end of the potential
budget range!) is the $995 LiveU Solo, featured in the official $1600 Gunrun IRL Streaming
Backpack.
Let’s see if we can use new Speedify for Linux technology to assemble a similar working
setup for a fraction of the price-
For this IRL streaming setup, we are using the Raspberry Pi as the centerpiece.
We want to stay pretty close to a standard IRL streaming setup on the outside, keeping
cables as concealed in the backpack as possible.
We also want to be able to use a standard HD video camera, so to make it work with the
Raspberry Pi we’re gonna need a capture card capable of transcoding the raw camera
footage into a format that the Pi can upload.
Then, we’ll need to program a button that can start and stop the stream.
Finally, to keep the stream stable and reliable while moving around outside, we want to incorporate
channel bonding so we can send data out over multiple 4G ]connections from different carriers
at the same time.
And the plan is to keep the total budget as low as possible.
Let’s get started!
We decided to go for the Sony AS-300 for the camera, since it’s a nice portable, wide
angle, HD camera and a popular choice for streamers.
At $298, it will take up the biggest chunk of our budget.
You should be able to swap it out for any other camera that works with a USB live capture
card.
We’ll hook it up to the pi with a micro-HDMI cable plugged into an Elgato Cam Link capture
card, adding $116.
Next, we’ll use a Raspberry Pi 4 for the computer, for an additional $55.
To keep it cool and protected in the backpack, we purchased a $10 GeeekPi Acrylic with
Fan RPi 4 case.
We’ll also need a battery to power the whole setup, which we purchased for $38.
To control the stream, we’ll use a Circuit Playground Express as a remote, which we picked
up for a total of $30 including the plastic case.
We’re holding everything together in a Cocoon GRID IT!
Accessory Organizer we got for $11, and we decided to mount both the camera and the Circuit
Playground remote on a $28 Smatree telescoping selfie stick.
For the backpack, we’re just using a Jansport backpack we already had laying around.
Finally, we need our mobile connections.
You can borrow some phones from friends to tether or plug in a few cellular adapters.
Here, we’ll be using a couple of phones plugged in via USB.
This brings the total budget to about $600, which is still about $1000 cheaper than the
Gunrun backpack, and you may not need to purchase all of this equipment if you already have
similar items available.
To get everything working for IRL streaming, we installed Speedify and FFmpeg on the Pi.
I’ll link to more detailed instructions in the description below.
We programmed buttons on the Circuit Playground Express to start and stop ffmpeg streaming
with a Python script that runs this hefty command:
This command lets us stream live to Twitch, in 720p at 24 frames per second, which is
about as good as the Pi can handle.
We’ll have our code to set up the streaming buttons available in a link in the description
below.
Speedify is set to automatic start so it runs as soon as the Pi boots up.
This way, we don’t need a UI for the Pi once we get everything together.
So let’s test it out!
How long are we?
What Time is it?
1:26
44 minutes.
All right.
Hey, this is Alex from Connectify, so this is the first test, just streaming live, of
our new IRL Speedify streaming backpack.
So we’ve got a Raspberry Pi, we’ve got 2 tethered cell phones, and we are just walking
around the city of Philadelphia.
So I guess we are 45 minutes in - I can’t see it but I’m hearing from people that
it’s been working well - so we’ll see it looks like a successful test so we’ll
be both uploading the video clips as well as the instructions on how we built this thing
and how to use it.
Let’s go back to Connectify’s office!
And we’re back.
I gotta get back to the lab.
Thanks for watching!