 It's the land of the endless bumper with reclaimed med tech, isn't it? I think it's charming. It gives everybody time to collect themselves and get in the right the mindset for learning. Thank you. It's very elegant, right? Yeah. And in 80s kind of way. I really like it. Every time just jamming. I do. I enjoy it. Every time I do it gets me in the mood. So let's talk today about open media, about the open media ecosystem that we'll be talking about and have been talking about for most of December so far. Is that true? Yeah. God, when this comes out will be at least three weeks into December, which is time is not real. Time's an illusion. It is an illusion. And this is when it compresses faster than any other time of the year. So we will be talking about several open source applications that we have been playing with, that you can run a reclaimed cloud and that together might build something akin to an open media ecosystem. We've talked about AzuraCast, Amanda and I, Amanda and Taylor have talked about Jitsie. Jitsie. And then Peertube is next week. But this week. You and Taylor. Yes. But this week. We are talking about owncast. Owncast. And I think the name kind of gives it away, but we're not going to give too much away because we have a format. At least I've come up with a very sophisticated format for each of these sessions I've been running. The first on AzuraCast and now on owncast. Notice there's a lot of casting going on in the open media ecosystem. So how are we going to run this pilot? Let me put it over to you. I believe it's the classic questions. Who, what, when, where, why and how. Wow. Six essential questions. As you said, the fundamentals of any good journalism approach so we can think of ourselves as kind of, you know. Investigative. You'll see how deep that goes in a second with our first question. What's our first question? Who is owncast? Who's responsible for creating the source of owncast? Who is behind, right? Who is behind owncast? That's a good question. So I'm going to pull up some of the sleuthing I've done online. This is owncast.online. That's the site you can go. That's a nice URL. Yeah, it's nice, right? .online. I like that. And one of the things we'll talk about with owncast. I don't want to get too deep because I want to answer the who. So I'll come back to the what in a second. But I believe having run oncast as a Docker container from Docker Hub, the name attached with that is Gabe Congus. And I don't know, but I believe now going to their GitHub, if you go to the very bottom and then I can kind of make this a little bigger, you'll realize that there is Gabe Congus. So I believe one of the lead developers maybe or maybe that name associated with owncast because they kind of keep like their owncast. They're not a person. They don't associate in the same way that maybe Buster Neese is with Azurecast. I believe Gabe Congus is one of the developers behind it. And that is my theory, but I don't know. I think it's a community of folks who are developing for it is my assumption. There's people who submit. But I believe Gabe Congus has something integral to deal with it. It looks like Gabe is the, if you scroll up, there's that little block on the right side that'll show different contributors. And it looks like Gabe is the top contributor. You're going to have to go up a little bit further. Right there. Yeah. 84 contributors. And then Gabe Congus is the very first one, but you're going a little far on the right hand side. Show me like here. Yes, right there. You're right. So there it is. We can say Gabe Congus at least is one of the is not the biggest contributor to the project. It's a good way to say it. Thank you. So not only are we journalism, but we're avoiding any kind of like, how would we say hyperbole? We don't want hyperbole here at Reclaim. We don't want to assume anything. Okay. So Gabe Congus seems to be the lead developer, biggest contributor to this open source project. What's the next question? I have to run through all of them. Who, what is owncast? What is owncast? Thank you. We probably maybe should have started with the what versus the who, but you know, we didn't write the book. We're just applying what we know. Right? Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Owncast is they, they refer to it as kind of like twitching a box. And it's funny because with a Zura cast, which was another program and open source radio broadcasting, software, they refer to it as web radio in a box. And, you know, a Zura cast does that quite well, but I really think the power of a Zura cast, it's a very complex app and it can allow you to do a lot. I think the beauty of owncast is it does one thing. It streams your video from wherever you're taking it. You get that stream key and that RTMP URL, you plug it in. And that's where it will, it will stream that video online. And it will even give you a little place for a chat. But the power of owncast, I think, is its simplicity. So what is it? It's a kind of open source alternative for streaming online. And it doesn't actually manage the stream, the video, the various shots. You can do that in something like OBS. Productions tools. It is really the actual tool you stream to. So it goes out online. Nice. Thank you. Yeah. You gotta, I do, I really like tools that are like, we're gonna pick one thing and we're gonna do it really, really well. One thing, exactly. I agree with that. Yeah. We talked about that a little bit with Ghost. Yeah. That's right. I think the next thing on our list would be when. When would you use owncast? The when for owncast is interesting. It's kind of comes, they almost, if I look in their about page, it's interesting because it almost sets the stage. 2020, world goes into lockdown, everything is happening via video and the logic. And if you read the about page for the owncast project, it's interesting because it's really their language is about reclaiming your space, not being part of these big corporate kind of casters that they pretend they're giving you things for free. But what the free is is your data and control over how you stream. And so they really are in line with kind of rethinking notions of ownership. And sharing online. In fact, one of the first accounts that I saw when I went from Twitter to Mastodon was owncast, which I think is telling, right? They quit Twitter. They were like, this is not where we want to be anymore. They went over to Mastodon. And I think it's very much in line with the ethos of this application. So I think it was around through 2020, 2019. Again, we could probably go to GitHub and look for like the first commit to get a better sense of like when exactly. But the oldest one I'm seeing is two years ago. And that's the code of contact. So we'll say roughly 2020, if we're wrong, let us know. But that's my guess based on what I read around with the about page, who knows how long they were working on it before they went fully public with it. But it really was one of those streaming apps that came up during the pandemic when everybody was shifting to video for variety of reasons. Yeah. Just thank you. Thank you for that wonderful question. Well, yeah, I don't know, I'm just I'm trying to I'm reminiscing now on I was thinking recently about just how everything was changing at the time and how just people reacted to that with such a lovely surge of creativity and flexibility. And it doesn't mean it was a good time, but it means it was, I don't know, I just like knowing that own cast came out of, Hey, while you're stuck at home, why not be empowered to take this back? I agree. And I think like one of the things is, you know, I was part of a community that went to use. And that's when we really explored Azure Cast, which became our open source radio station solution for something we run called the S106 radio own cast was something I played with at the time. And I was streaming to it regularly. And I love the idea of trying to do karaoke through own cast, which worked quite well. And so like, you know, it was just a time to explore and play with these technologies. And it has worked quite well, I think. Yeah, definitely. So with the when what when where would you host own cast? It's a very good question. Thank you. I think that you would need to host it. They recommend on their website that you need to you basically spin up a VPS or run it through a Docker instance. So a lot of these applications pretty much everyone you either need a full blown server and install it through an operating system, whether it's a boom to a Debbie and one of them and then follow the command lines or alternatively, and then you would install the stack and all the details or alternatively, you could run it through Docker for our instance. I have been running this through Docker on reclaim cloud, which is reclaim hosting cloud service. And we're using a Docker instance. It was really quite straightforward. I had talked with Taylor actually not too long before getting on this stream about creating a one click application for own cast and reclaim cloud. And I think that would be fun and very doable. So that is something to maybe look for in the future. Yeah, we'll add that to the it's going to say to the list. We just have a lot of projects. A lot awesome. It's a good one. And he was excited about it when we talked about it. So we'll see where that goes. But after he did the one click installer for ghost and the mastodon and we have one for peer tube and Azura cast also for Jitsi. So in fact own cast right now is the only application we've been talking about over the last few months that doesn't have a one click installer. Okay. So we can fix that though. Yeah. Easy peasy. So let me I told you I'd have to run through it every time. I wasn't lying when they're why why run own cast? Why not? Yeah. And I think the reason why is you're kind of tired of maybe some of these big, you know, you don't want to be part of the how would we say chop shop of twitch or some of the others where it starts to come in where they have takedown notices. It's all been monetized, right? It's all about like scaling and broadcasting and like, you know, you hear these nightmare scenarios about these twitch streamers who can't get offline or else they're afraid to lose like, you know, some of their income or whatever. Now, I'm not that's not necessarily, you know, my interest nor am I deep into that community. But I will say that I do think that their logic on their about page about, you know, a place where you're not being monetized, a place where you can very fairly cheaply be using a Docker instance, for example, and reclaim cloud, start and stop the stream as you need. It doesn't have to always be running, right? It's a very simple application. And, you know, live streaming of events is not something that, you know, after the after the pandemic, it's fairly like, how many live streamed events did we attend during that time, right? Like everything moved to live streaming. And that's a very powerful tool to do for an event or for, and this is a very focused tool for just that. So I think there's many tools that potentially could do that. But what I like about owncast is its simplicity and focus that we talked about earlier, that it really does one thing and one thing well, is it streams your video to the web and the easy, elegant interface. Yeah. Yeah. I feel like I keep repeating myself, but I feel like, as I said, two minutes ago, we love a tool that knows exactly what it's about and exactly what it wants to do. Yeah. And I think that that simplicity can go a long way. Yeah. Because elegant, you just said. There we go. It's all connected. Now we come to the last one, right? And where, why, how would you set up owncast? So I talked about it a little bit and I'm not going to go too deep into it, but it might be worth, I'll probably share a link to this. There is a video, at least this is how you would set it up on Reclaim Cloud. I hope there's going to be a one-click application here in the marketplace soon. But even if there isn't, there is documentation at Reclaim Hosting Support where it will take you through the process. This is using Docker and a load balancer in front of Docker so you can map a domain if that's how you want to do it. So this takes you through it. I won't do this right now, but what I will show you is what it looks like and how it kind of works. So there's an installing owncast on Reclaim Cloud video should you need it. And you want to go through the process, but this is something you can install on Reclaim Cloud and once you do, this gives you a sense of the interface. So this, when you go live, will become the video, right? And then right here, as soon as it goes live, this chat activates and that's the whole thing. Like we'll look at the backend, but really that's what I like about it is it's quite simple. So I'm going to go in here and once you have it loaded, again, you can follow that documentation for all the details. But once I log in, this is the interface and this is giving you the streaming URL. So the URL you would put into something like OBS, as well as the stream key, which is that private key you don't want to share. And then you can take this live video and you can embed it into another site. So say, you know, this whole like cast I've bothered about TV that I'm using, you can take the video actually as an iframe and embed it in another site, right? Conference site, whatever. And so when you have your live stream of that session, it's running through owncast, doing its thing, you have chat on the fly. And then when it's over, boom, shut it down. And that's it. Applications in, it's out. That's very cool. I remember, well, this is more of a topic for the future. But I know we were thinking about how to, now that we've gone through all of these different tools, integrate them into one, maybe two spaces so that you can use them as an ecosystem as a suite, rather than here's a bunch of disparate tools that are thematically linked. And that iframe embed sounds like it could be a very good step towards that. Yeah. The iframe embed is nice. And another thing I'm looking at, but I didn't get it to work yet is the idea of taking the stream key and password. So the streaming URL and stream key or password. And actually putting them into a service like Jitsi, which is, you know, it's an open source equivalent of zoom or something like that. And when you have a discussion, your ability to stream that discussion or that session out to something like owncast should be possible. Whether or not that link works or I'm doing it right is not clear yet, but we have other tools we can do it with. You can do it with YouTube through Jitsi. You can do it with PeerTube. And my guess is, owncast will probably work. I just need to do more researching to that. But that's another thing. So like you're in a tool like Jitsi, which is again, like an open source zoom and anything you do there can be streamed out to a website so other people can watch it. Yeah. So clean. I'm not thinking of, I mean, we love StreamYard. StreamYard is a great tool, but one of the really nice things about StreamYard is that ability to have it be sort of a conference and sort of a stream and sort of a presentation all at once. Yeah. And I do agree with that. And just look at the interface here. This shows you a number of viewers, right? Not many. There's chats, messages, like I love just how simple it is, right? Here's the general setup. Just put in your name, server setup, gives you some details that you can change your key, which is essentially your password to log into owncast. And then here are some of the ports and RTM ports. There's the configuration. If you want to get your video stream just right, there's the chat, turn it on or off, make certain things forbidden. And then here's storage. If you want to offload or store enabled, you can enable storage, but then you can offload it as well. I think I actually have to look into that. So, but I don't know if you would, the storage is interesting because I wonder your storage provider, like your, your streams would get recorded and then you're connecting to an S3 bucket or to Google drive or to something like that. What it is, is I think is if you want a live stream, something you have stored in S3. Oh, so by default, I do not believe, which is where I was getting confused that owncast, actually, like it doesn't record your video. It doesn't do any of that. That has to happen in the other application like OBS or Jitsi, which Jitsi does, right? Yeah. But this can link through storage to videos you have already uploaded and they can stream out. So you can have almost like say a TV station where streaming from S3 and you kind of pull that video in. I'd have to do more look, I'd have to do more research into that. But it does say instead of serving video directly from your personal server, you can use a S3 compatible storage provider to offload the bandwidth and storage requirements elsewhere. So you can actually use that like S3 or digital ocean spaces to serve that video so that your server that's running owncast isn't really bogged down, which is an interesting option, one I have not played with. And it's cool. The other thing is there's various utilities. Again, just a quick overlook of your site. Here's some logs if things go wrong. I probably should upgrade, but given I'm running with Docker, I'll wait and do that through Docker. And then here's basic integrations. And this is always a nice one. Webhooks. I've been playing with webhooks for Azuracast, which basically allows it to integrate with other applications. And I'm sure owncast integrates well with Mastodon, which might be a fun thing to play with in terms of a webhook. So these are all send automatic notifications or something like that. Exactly. So when you go live, other people will be notified, which is beautiful because then you only need it when it's live and people will know wherever your audience is. So it's kind of what happens with something like Twitch, right? So that is the whole interface. Like that's it. It doesn't really do that much more. It has this is really what you need is the streaming URL and key. Those are the crucial pieces. And then here's how it would work. So let's say I grab these two and we'll talk a little bit about why my key in OBS is a little different from the one you see here. And that's something I hope we fix with the one-click installer. But here we are. And then I'm going to go to OBS, right? So there it is. And in OBS, you're going to see my camera. That's a picture of me. And you see the camera obviously in our recording, but then this is the camera I'm running through OBS. And this is the image that's going to go out to go out to owncast on that cast.bava.tv. And the way I do that, the way I link my OBS with owncast is I simply go here to settings. I click on settings. And then there's going to be in the settings of OBS something called stream. And at this point, I grab the stream URL, which they call the server, and the stream key, which is the password. I copy them in there. I save it or click OK. And then that will do it. Now, you will notice that this is not the cast.bava.tv slash, you know, or colon. This is a different URL. And that's because we're using a load balancer for mapping a domain in Reclaim Cloud. But like I said, Taylor and I have been discussing making this easier. So it's just the URL you see in the dashboard of owncast. So stay tuned on that one. That one we may be able to have an updated so that it would be both the same instead of pointing to one thing that is secretly another thing. That's right. And this basically is outlined in the documentation, which if we have a one-click installer, I will be happy to retire and let the new installer be in. So there we are. We've put in the stream URL and the key, and then we can click Start Streaming. Once we do that, and I've started streaming, I should be able to go back to my owncast instance. And lo and behold, it will have this play button. And once I click that, that will be me talking. All right. And I'm probably 15, 20 seconds behind. Yeah. You're on a delay for sure. And once I do that, I pause it. And then if I wanted to, you'll see that this is now live. I can chat. And there it is. I am now chatting. Anyone who came to this page would be given a kind of anonymous name. You can force them to log in or not. But really, it's a very simple chat application. And it's a, like you see, very nice. There it is. Streaming live chat. Look, there you are. You got in there. I think it's Eager Heisenberg. Yeah. Gives you those fun names. So thank you for doing that. And that's it. And that's all oncast does. Like, it just takes the video stream from wherever you have it. It brings it to this URL. It gives you a bit of a chat. And I say, oh, like it's nothing. It's something. But like I said, it's a one tool that does well. And that's what I love about oncast. That's honestly just good. I don't know how many ways I can say I like that. You want to see this guy again? Yeah, sure. Let's see it. And now it's, I would say it's catching up. What is he doing? What is he about to say? What do you think? I wonder if your sound is streaming because if so, it's going to sound like you're having half a conversation, which is going to be great. See, now I'm finally catching up with me. Yeah. So, yeah. So that's it. That's oncast and basically in a nutshell. If you're looking for a very simple streaming application that does not run through like things like Twitch or Facebook had done that video streaming. I'm not sure what degree they're still doing that. Obviously. They're moving into the metaverse. They're streaming. I have no idea. That was a joke. Second life. Yeah. Oh, you mean second life? Yeah. Oh, yeah, yeah. So, yeah, that's oncast. I recommend it. I do hope that we can get a one click installer out here and then talk about that later on in this, you know, six week blitz of open media ecosystem tools. But oncast is definitely one to check out. One of the things that's interesting pilot is some of the, some of these tools overlap. And one of the overlaps you're going to see with oncast and with peer tube when you talk about that with Taylor is that peer tube not only allows you to upload videos, bring in videos from YouTube and create an archive, but it also allows you to do what oncast does, which is stream and it will give you the key and the streaming URL and the key just like oncast. And it finally has integrated chat. So some of the functionality that oncast only does is part of a bigger ecosystem of things that peer tube does. But like you said, you know, sometimes if you're running an event and you have just like one goal or you're trying to do one thing, oncast may be the tool. If you're ongoing archiving video and doing all sorts of stuff and pulling in videos from YouTube that you want to archive and then doing live streams that you want to archive, maybe peer tube is your tool. That's really just a question that you have to evaluate, but they're both there and I like them a lot, both for different reasons. That was something that I was wondering about because I know that we host a lot of our streams through peer tube because we want that archival aspect, we want to be able to say like you, there was the mastodon installer stream yesterday, the day before maybe, and the ability to say, not only did we do this, we have the video. You can go back and watch it. You have even the own cast installation video, which is on YouTube, not on peer tube, but that question that I had was, I know that these two overlap in some way, what's the strengths of one versus the other. To know peer tube is really good for that archival angle, own cast is really good for streaming. That's what it does. Exactly. One of the things I had a hard time getting my head around when first starting streaming is kind of the decoupling of the tool where you bring together and kind of, I would say kind of, how would you say it in a good way? Bring together and integrating the various elements of your video, audio, various shots, something like OBS. And then the tool that will actually stream it out. And often they're separate, but it was hard for me to understand that until I actually played with OBS. I'm like, okay, now I have OBS. I have to stream it. How do I stream it? And one way is Twitch, one way is YouTube, but then own cast or peer tube becomes yet another tool. And why we like them is they're open source, you can self host them. You have a certain amount of control over that. If you're not looking for scale and more likes and subscribers, maybe that's a good bet for you. Yeah. Man, I had a question and now I've immediately lost it because I was listening too hard to what you were saying. Oh, not a question. I was going to say in terms of OBS and production, are we ever going to talk about that in the future, Jim? We are. We're going to talk about OBS the second half of January. So all of these tools like own cast or peer tube or Jits even, they're going to be tools that we can talk about in relationship to, you know, more interesting kind of production to your point, like how you produce something. And OBS was really on everyone tip of everyone's tongue during the pandemic because people got tired of the talking heads and wanted to find ways to do like, you know, I always think of OBS is similar to what maybe Photoshop does for images, right? It adds layers that allows you to do more dynamic things that allows you to control some of that visual palette. And for that, it's a very powerful tool and it's open source. So it fits with our Blitz of open source tools quite nicely. Yeah. I like that. I like that a lot. Is there any, are there any other, we're out of questions. Is there any other thing you want to hit before we say goodbye? No, I think, you know what, own cast, own it, cast it. Reclaim it. Yeah. On the cloud. Yeah. Yeah. And we'll link to some of those guides if you want to play with own cast. Yeah, we can have that in the weekly blog post. We can probably drop that in the chat as well. Perfect. Whatever you need. All right. This has been great. Thanks, pilot.