How to stream on YouTube using a Raspberry Pi?

Question

So I'm trying to stream on YouTube using a raspberry pi. The idea is for one raspberry pi to be used to stream the connected webcam and for another to display the stream, sort of like a surveillance camera. Both raspberry pi's are currently using Raspbian.

So is it possible for me to stream directly to YouTube on a Raspberry Pi.

Answer 1

Audio working! This worked for me from a raspberry pi 4 with an rbp v1.3 camera and cheap usb audio interface. Also gets the default audio which you can set in the alsamixer:

raspivid -o - -t 0 -vf -hf -fps 30 -b 6000000 | ffmpeg -f alsa -ac 1 -ar 44100 -i default -acodec pcm_s16le -f s16le -f h264 -i - -vcodec copy -acodec aac -ab 128k -g 60 -strict -2 -f flv rtmp://<destination/streamkey>

Answer 2

"So is it possible for me to stream directly to YouTube on a Raspberry Pi?"

Yes. But you're going to need to do a bit of configuring and get different hardware depending on your project needs.

For my project, a day and night doorway "security camera" that streams live to youtube, I chose a Raspberry Pi Zero W running raspbian (headless) and a camera module with auto IR switching capabilities and IR lights.

I have edited the raspbian image so all of the configurations of the wifi and camera module interfaces, code, and dependencies I need are pre-installed, so I can just flash an sd card, slap it in a pi+camera+powersupply setup and it does its thing.

So, for this answer to be helpful at all, you're going to need to do plenty of research on FFMPEG, know what it is, learn what it does, and get it installed on your board... You should be able to run a few tests getting FFMPEG to just spit out maybe a 10-second long video from your camera. I wouldn't bother reading any more of my ramblings if you have not got that far yet, because things are about to get specific.

So, your board is online, you can see it on the network, it's got internet, it's got ffmpeg, it's ready to go.

Here is the ffmpeg "stream command" I use to start the live stream:

raspivid -o - -t 0 -vf -hf -fps 60 -b 12000000 -rot 180 | ffmpeg -re -ar 44100 -ac 2 -acodec pcm_s16le -f s16le -ac 2 -i /dev/zero -i - -vcodec copy -acodec aac -ab 384k -g 17 -strict experimental -f flv rtmp://a.rtmp.youtube.com/live2/SESSION_ID

I arrived at this "stream command" above by tweaking each parameter you see, one by one, and in different combinations and I eventually got a really crisp 1080p stream with no buffering issues at all except for the occasional bit of wifi lag that comes around on my setup. You are going to need to do a ton of research into what every parameter does to get things just right and trust me it's going to be a pain figuring out what does what in the beginning. I would lurk all around StackOverflow and other resources and just plug around and see what you can get to come out of your setup when it comes to these FFMPEG commands.

To test if this "stream command" or any other you find works for you, just change SESSION_ID at the end to your stream key and run it in the console.

After you get an output you are happy with, figure out on your own how you want to trigger your camera to start streaming, if you want it to start recording as soon as the board is ready to start sending data, you accomplish this by putting your "stream command" in /etc/rc.local and it will run that command as soon as it can.

For my project, I use 18650 cells charged by solar panels as the power source so I have to be conscious about the power I use so I wrote some NodeJS program monitor just that.

Alright, that's enough talking into the wind for now. Hopefully, any of this helped someone out there, cheers.

Answer 3

You can use any Pi supported RTMP/Flash encoder to publish a YouTube live event. One example is ffmpeg which can be compiled on Raspbian.

Create your YouTube live event using the guide. You can find the various encoder settings here.

When everything is ready you can start streaming. For a 640x480@25 700k video stream the command will be something like:

ffmpeg -f v4l2 -framerate 25 -video_size 640x480 -i /dev/video0 -c:v libx264 -b:v 700k -maxrate 700k -bufsize 700k -an -f flv rtmp://<youtube_rtmp_server/<youtube_live_stream_id>