Yeahhh….I should have known better than to think that everything would be peachy when trying to work with Owncast.

It’s not Owncast per se because overall it was doing OK. However, @Stargrace had brought some errors to my attention that couldn’t be overcome by the configuration I had set for the Akami Linode server that I was using to host the Owncast instance. Because I had set the broadcast to use “passthrough”, Owncast was essentially taking my pre-transcoded video feed from OBS and just “passing it through” to clients. I am apparently running the only browser on the market that had no problems with this, but Chrome and Firefox both didn’t like the bits that OBS was firing straight through the Owncast platform, and that resulted in some uncurable errors for viewers.

I had tried to set up the Owncast instance using a shared CPU instance, which works pretty well with a blog. The passthrough option allowed the transcoding to happen on my machine and not on the server, meaning I could get away with less horsepower. In order to meet minimum requirements for a machine which could transcode, though, I’d have to choose at a dedicated CPU with with at least 4GB of RAM, which evidenced by the grid above would have cost me $36USD per month. For breathing room, the 8GB dedicated CPU was recommended, at $72USD per month. While I love you all and believe that you’re worth the price asked for 4K video, I couldn’t commit to streaming often enough to justify that kind of layout. If I had a dedicated audience whom I could mobilize to finance the cost of leaving a more popular platform in favor of this option, then I’d have done it in a heartbeat, but so few people read these posts, and I suspect even fewer would watch my streams, so a paid hosting plan is simply not in the cards. If I had a powerful enough machine that I could use to host my own instance, I’d do that instead, but until or unless my daughter upgrades her computer and returns my old machine to me, that’s also not going to happen.

Now what? Truth be told, after I got everything set up yesterday, walked away to get some food, and returned to my desk, I found myself hesitating. Do I really want to stream? It’s work. It’s effort, which isn’t itself a problem, but it’s effort over and above what goes into a hobby that I enjoy. That kind of turns it into a job, or at least an obligation considering that I’d need to find a groove to settle into, make a schedule, advertise advertise advertise, and all of that. The ROI would need to be visible, even a little, or else I’d start questioning my desire to continue. The one saving grace is that I know that I’m not alone in this; I know many people who climb aboard this merry-go-round of wanting to produce, trying it out, and the falling away only to reconsider it again later on. We want to do this for our own weird reasons.

I ran some tests on YouTube last night and things looked pretty good. I spent way less time setting up that outlet than I did Owncast, and at the end of the day the recordings were automatically saved for me. That kind of prevents me from being able to edit them down for length and clarity, which I’d prefer to do for an after-event archive, although I also record locally for that exact purpose. I don’t even know where I am on Twitch; I used to be at the affiliate level, but I haven’t sent anything there in years now. I checked the dashboard and there are so many bells and whistles offered and, I feel, required of people streaming there that I can’t even imagine where to start or how I’d not get overwhelmed trying to make a home there. I don’t even want to talk about the discoverability situation, which I suspect I’d have to accept being a non-starter considering my habits.

I’ll have some time this evening, so I might give the YouTube situation a shot, just to see how it goes in terms of getting off the launch pad and whether it feels intrusive to my goal of playing a game, and if it doesn’t feel like it’s adding too much overhead, I’ll strongly consider it.