Close

ZeroPhone - streaming to Youtube Live, Facebook or Twitch

A project log for ZeroPhone - a Raspberry Pi smartphone

Pi Zero-based open-source mobile phone (that you can assemble for 50$ in parts)

aryaArya 03/04/2017 at 01:000 Comments

I recently spent a weekend on a hackathon. It was organized by Garage48, an organization that makes hackathons, among other things. This hackathon was called "Hardware&Arts", naturally, it's hardware-centered, with a really small part of "arts" in it. I pitched an idea, assembled a small team interested in it - and we've made it in 48 hours! More importantly, it can work with ZeroPhone, too.

%YOUTUBE_VIDEO_OF_OUR_PITCH%

The idea is Streamo. It's a lifestreaming device, a camera and a microphone streaming your life to the Internet 24/7. It's not for the faint of heart, but I have a friend who believes it could be the next cool thing, and is willing to do whatever it takes. And, of course, it's Pi-powered (I've described it here earlier, it's #Twitch Your Life - a Raspberry Pi streamer device, but it's an old description).


The gist of it is a ffmpeg command-line - video from camera, audio from microphone, all is re-encoded and goes into an rtmp stream. We spent quite some time making it work, you could say we spent a day and a half debugging one line of code =) Regardless, it's very simple - and it's not something you'd be capable of doing on your Android, not without a smartphone-tailored app, at least.

Funny thing is that the command-line actually needs minimal changes to work across at least 4 services - Facebook, YouTube, Twitch and Ustream. That means - there could be a ZeroPhone app for one-click streaming to the most popular streaming services out there.


There's still plenty of work to be done. We need to make it more hardware-accelerated, test it for connection instabilities, make safeguards, command output parsing and

I'll only guide my friend on the software (and develop hardware for him), I do have enough projects to manage already. I'm going to build a small Pi Zero-powered platform for him, with plenty of batteries to get through the day (and a Pi3 workstation for quicker development, if he ever needs to recompile ffmpeg, like I did). However, once it's done, it could be easily ported to the ZeroPhone, so that ZeroPhone users get this feature, too - not only for lifestreaming, but for any time they want. What are your thoughts on this?

Discussions