Re-encoding a live-stream using nginx-rtmp on Ubuntu 20.04

Preface

I started live-streaming my gaming sessions a few months ago and have been using the NVENC encoding. I found that the quality wasn’t that great and I had a Ubuntu server around and I wanted to try to find out what I could do with it to help have better quality on my stream, and maybe record all my sessions with a higher quality.

I also didn’t want to buy a capture card or a Windows license for my server since I’m very comfortable with Ubuntu Server and didn’t have more usable hardware around.

The setup

Ubuntu server

Ubuntu Server 20.04 LTS.
On it is installed nginx-rtmp and FFmpeg.

Main computer

I use this computer for pretty much everything I do.
I use OBS with NVENC encoding.

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Memcrashed: Memcached amplification attack

Memcrashed

The discovery of a new vector that allowed great amplification has been in the middle of a new DDoS technique that allowed attackers to reach 1.7 Tbps of network traffic at the beginning of this month as reported by Arbor Networks thus setting a new record for largest denial of service attack less than a week after it was set at 1.35 Tbps as reported by GitHub on the 28th of February.

This vector has been made available because of the abusable nature of UDP communications and the carelessness of system administrators who allowed global access to their memcached instances.

By spoofing your IP address as your target and sending packets to a publicly accessible memcached server, you may gain a factor of 51 200 of amplification on your network load to your target address as reported by Cloudflare.

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Revamping and branding PEX’s Twitch.tv live-stream

Preface

I have been one of Philippe-Olivier Crépin (PEX)’s live-stream viewers and subscribers for quite some time and recently I was tasked with the re-work of his live-streaming brand, one of the first time I’ve worked on a brand that wasn’t mine.

To achieve this I teamed-up with Jolyanne Du Cap (ColorJunkie) which has good experience as a graphical artist and branding in general and with whom I worked with in the past on multiple projects.

The beginning

The general feeling that his old image told was; roughness. Which was in accordance with the game he is playing during his live-streaming sessions (Counter-Strike: Global Offensive), but didn’t fit either Philippe-Olivier’s personality nor the message he wanted to share with his viewers.

With that in mind, we started by defining the most important part of his new brand, the conveyed image. After going through a few sessions of brain-storming we held on the key-words; clean and simple.

The next step was to define the key colours. We did not want to go too far from his previous colour scheme (red and black) as we wanted to keep a sense of continuity, so we choose to stay within the same colour ranges, but we would make greater use of secondary colours. So we went with a darker red, white elements and grey variants if the scene required it.

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Live-streaming using a computer and a Ubuntu server to Twitch.tv

This article is outdated, please go to this link for an updated version: https://blog.maaudet.ca/2020/07/re-encoding-a-live-stream-using-nginx-rtmp-on-ubuntu-20-04/

Preface

I started live-streaming my gaming sessions a few months ago and have been using the NVENC encoding. I found that the quality wasn’t that great and I had a Ubuntu server around and I wanted to try to find out what I could do with it to help have better quality on my stream, and maybe record all my sessions with a higher quality.

I also didn’t want to buy a capture card or a Windows license for my server since I’m very comfortable with Ubuntu Server and didn’t have more usable hardware around.

The setup

Ubuntu server

Ubuntu Server 14.04 LTS.
On it is installed nginx-rtmp and FFmpeg.

Main computer

I use this computer for pretty much everything I do.
I use OBS with NVENC encoding.

Continue reading Live-streaming using a computer and a Ubuntu server to Twitch.tv