grvydev/project-lightspeed

Project Lightspeed is a self-hosted live streaming server you can run on your own machine or server. Its main claim is sub-second latency: a viewer watching in a browser sees the stream less than one second behind what the broadcaster is doing, which is much faster than typical platforms like Twitch or YouTube Live where delays of five to thirty seconds are common. The project is built around three separate pieces that work together. The first is an ingest server, written in Rust, that receives the video signal from broadcasting software. The second is a relay server, written in Go, that takes that incoming video and distributes it to viewers using WebRTC, a technology browsers use natively for real-time video. The third is a React-based web frontend that viewers open in their browser to watch the stream. You install and run all three on your own infrastructure. On the broadcaster side, you use OBS, a widely-used free streaming application, and point it at your Lightspeed server instead of a streaming platform. The ingest server uses a protocol called FTL (which Mixer, a now-defunct streaming platform, originally developed) to receive that video. FTL is what makes the low latency possible compared to the older RTMP protocol that most platforms use. Because all three components are separate repositories, the project is modular. The README notes that you can swap in your own frontend or write a custom ingest server without touching the other parts. This also means setup requires cloning and building three different codebases, so the installation process involves Rust, Go, and Node.js toolchains. The project notes that some parts of the codebase have known bugs and that some installation methods referencing older repositories are deprecated. It is a community-driven project with a Discord server for support and discussion.