av-caster

AvCaster Chat: Issues:

A light-weight native gStreamer GUI for screencast, webcam, and audio streaming AvCaster is a native appliction built upon the JUCE framework, utilizing gStreamer as the media backend and libircclient as the chat backend. It is currently capable of recording to file or streaming to an RTMP server with screen capture (full-screen), webcam (full-screen or overlay), and audio (mono or stereo). It is moderately configurable, with preset configurations for streaming via popular servers such as livecoding.tv, and allows custom user-defined configurations to be stored as additional presets. This initial implementation is only compatible with GNU/Linux, but it has been designed for portability. Let us know if it would interest you to see AvCaster ported to another platform (e.g. Windows, Mac, mobile) by leaving a note on the relevant Cross-platform Milestone issue. Feel free to open issues for other platforms if they are not yet listed.

Build Status Release: Development: Lint:

Motivation

The motivation behind this project is that streaming with a feature-rich, bleeding-edge client such as OBS and FMLE is very CPU intensive even on reasonably capable machines. Those are well suited as a substitute for dedicated capture hardware for high-performance scenarios such as game-casting; but in less demanding scenarios such as live performance, design-casting, and code-casting, there is more utility in reserving your CPU cycles for primary tasks such as audio processing, source compiling, or graphics rendering.

A command-line solution is the obvious choice for such scenarios but obviously lacks real-time control and preview. The primary design goal for AvCaster is to strike a reasonable balance between headless performance and a graphical feature set.

Get AvCaster

NOTE: AvCaster requires gStreamer >= v1.6.0 and the non-free 'ugly' plugins which may not be available in your standard main/free repository (see "runtime dependencies" for your distro below). These packages may be available in third-party repositories for some distros; but use of third-party repositories can neither be supported nor endorsed. For this reason we are currently supporting only Arch , Debian/Ubuntu , and OpenSuse/Suse.

AvCaster Package Repositories

The OpenSuse Build Service hosts AvCaster x86 and x86-64 binary package repositories for the following distributions:

• Debian 8 , Ubuntu 15.10
• Fedora 23
• OpenSuse Tumbleweed , Suse SLE 12

Follow the instructions there to subscribe your package manager or download the latest package for your distribution directly. Let us know if you would like packaging for another distribution or architecture.

Other GNU/Linux:

Refer to "Building from Source" below.

Community Support

AvCaster is a free and open-source community project and is still very much in its infancy; so testers, comments, and suggestions are appreciated. Pull requests are quite welcomed and any submissions that advance the project toward is proposed milestones will be accepted. If there is significant community support for this project, it could be transfered to a github organization, an IRC and/or gitter chat could be established, a website could be created, an so on. Let us hear your ideas. If you would like to help to improve AvCaster, we could especially use your help in the following areas:

• developers/consultants (especially with gStreamer expertise)
• designers (logo , website , GUI graphics/layout)
• beta testers (anyone who streams regularly)
• HOWTO documentation and screencasts

In any case you can "Star" this repo above if you like this project or "Watch" the repo or visit the home page of the AvCaster Wiki for updates.

Getting Help / Bug Reporting

If AvCaster refuses to launch after changing some parameters in the GUI you can try deleting the persistent configuration file in your user AppData dir (e.g. ~/.config/av-caster/av-caster.bin).

Please report any problems on the AvCaster Issue Tracker.

Feel free join the Gitter Chat to post any questions or comments or, well ... just chat.

Building from Source

NOTE: AvCaster requires gStreamer >= v1.6.0 and the non-free 'ugly' plugins which may not be available in your standard main/free repository (see "runtime dependencies" for your distro below). These packages may be available in third-party repositories for some distros; but use of third-party repositories can neither be supported nor endorsed. For this reason we are currently supporting only Arch , Debian/Ubuntu , and OpenSuse/Suse.

ArchLinux:

### build and install via makepkg ###
$ wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/bill-auger/av-caster/master/Builds/Packaging/PKGBUILD
$ makepkg --install ./PKGCONFIG

Debian/Ubuntu:

### build dependencies ###
$ sudo apt-get install build-essential libfreetype6-dev libgstreamer-plugins-base1.0-dev \
                       libircclient-dev libx11-dev libxcursor-dev libxinerama-dev
### runtime dependencies (Debian 'testing/unstable' , Ubuntu >= 15.10) ###
$ sudo apt-get install freeglut3 gstreamer1.0-alsa gstreamer1.0-plugins-bad       \
                       gstreamer1.0-plugins-good gstreamer1.0-plugins-ugly        \
                       gstreamer1.0-pulseaudio libfreetype6 libgl1-mesa-glx       \
                       libircclient1 libx11-6 libxcomposite1 libxcursor1 libxext6 \
                       libxinerama1 libxrender1
### compile ###
$ cd Builds/Makefile
$ make
$ sudo make install
### run ###
$ av-caster

Fedora:

### build dependencies ###
$ su -c "dnf install freetype-devel gcc-c++ gstreamer1-plugins-base-devel                \
                     libircclient-devel libX11-devel libXinerama-devel libXcursor-devel"
### runtime dependencies (rpmfusion repositories) ###
$ RPMFUSION_URL=http://download1.rpmfusion.org
$ FEDORA_VERSION=$(rpm -E %fedora)
$ REPO1_PKG=$RPMFUSION_URL/free/fedora/rpmfusion-free-release-$FEDORA_VERSION.noarch.rpm
$ REPO2_PKG=$RPMFUSION_URL/nonfree/fedora/rpmfusion-nonfree-release-$FEDORA_VERSION.noarch.rpm
$ su -c "dnf install $REPO1_PKG $REPO2_PKG"
$ su -c "dnf install gstreamer1-plugins-good gstreamer1-plugins-bad-free \
                     gstreamer1-plugins-ugly libircclient1"
### compile ###
$ cd Builds/Makefile
$ make
$ su -c "make install"
### run ###
$ av-caster

OpenSuse/Suse:

### build dependencies ###
$ sudo zypper install freetype2-devel gcc-c++ gstreamer-plugins-base-devel               \
                      libircclient-devel libX11-devel libXinerama-devel libXcursor-devel
### runtime dependencies ###
$ sudo zypper install gstreamer-plugins-good gstreamer-plugins-bad-free \
                      gstreamer-plugins-ugly libircclient1
### compile ###
$ cd Builds/Makefile
$ make
$ sudo make install
### run ###
$ av-caster

Other GNU/Linux:

Install the corresponding libraries as above for your system and compile similarly.

Developers and Designers

Please read the contribution guidelines in CONTRIBUTING.md.

Similar Projects

There were several similar projects considered for expansion before this project was launched fresh. They all can capture and mux in audio but they capture screen only (no webcam/text/logo) and only two of them feature a real-time preview. They are ordered roughly by feature-set from most to least capable in terms of the AvCaster project's feature requirements.

• SimpleScreenRecorder - feature-rich with real-time preview
• gtk-recordmydesktop - feature-rich with real-time preview
• kazam - feature-rich but no preview
• vokoscreen - similar features as kazam with pretty and intutive GUI
• ffmpeg-gui - cross-platform QT basic ffmpeg launcher
• ffmpeggui - Win32 basic ffmpeg launcher

Also, the ffmpeg bash script that AvCaster was originally conceived to wrap is in this gist if an ultra-lightweight command-line webcasting tool is more suitable. It is capable of recording to file or streaming to an RTMP server with screen capture, webcam, text overlay, and stereo audio. It requires some manual configuration o/c, but is approximately twice as nice.