I’m looking for a way to capture my computer screen along with system audio and send it directly to a Twitch streaming server. Right now I know most people use OBS Studio or Streamlabs for this, but I want to build something custom that can do the same thing programmatically.
Basically I need to grab whatever is showing on my monitor, capture the audio that’s playing, and then push both of these to Twitch’s streaming servers without relying on third party streaming applications.
Has anyone done something like this before? What libraries or approaches would work best for this kind of project? I’m open to different programming languages if that makes it easier to implement.
I built something like this with Python - used opencv-python for screen capture and pyaudio for the mic. The encoding part’s the real pain though. You’ll need ffmpeg subprocess calls for the RTMP pipeline, or grab the python-ffmpeg bindings if you don’t want to leave Python. Biggest headache I hit was audio/video sync - your frame rates need to match or you’ll get nasty drift. Also, thread your capture and streaming separately or you’ll drop frames when things get busy. Twitch RTMP setup’s pretty simple once you’ve got your stream key figured out.
For this project, check out FFmpeg - it handles both video and audio streaming to Twitch really well. Use gdigrab on Windows or avfoundation on macOS for screen capture. You’ll probably need extra tools or virtual audio devices to mix system audio with your mic. Watch Twitch’s encoding settings too since they’re picky about bitrate and keyframe intervals. You’ll need to experiment a bit to get the best performance and lowest latency.
Honestly, just use a GStreamer pipeline - way less headache than building your own encoder. Something like gst-launch-1.0 ximagesrc ! videoconvert ! x264enc ! flvmux ! rtmpsink location=rtmp://ingest.twitch.tv/live/YOUR_KEY gets you most of the way there. Add pulsesrc for audio mixing. Bit tricky to get working the first time but super reliable once it’s set up.
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