I’m looking for a way to capture my computer screen along with system audio and send it straight to a Twitch streaming server. Right now most people use OBS Studio or similar programs but I want to do this programmatically without those tools.
I need to grab the desktop content and microphone input, then encode everything and push it to the RTMP URL that Twitch provides. Has anyone done something like this before? I’m wondering if there are libraries or frameworks that can handle the screen recording part and the streaming part together.
Basically I want to build my own simple streaming solution instead of relying on existing broadcasting applications. Any code examples or guidance would be really helpful.
GStreamer’s another solid choice. Used it when I built a custom streaming setup for our company presentations. You can chain together pipeline elements for desktop capture, audio, encoding, and RTMP output - all programmatically. Steep learning curve but super flexible once you get the pipeline syntax down. Use ximagesrc on X11 or d3d11screencapturesrc on Windows for desktop capture, grab audio with pulsesrc or wasapisrc, encode with x264enc, then push to rtmpsink. Memory management’s tricky and you’ve got to handle pipeline state changes carefully or it’ll crash. Docs are all over the place but timestamp sync works better than other options I’ve tried.
I built something like this for work last year. FFmpeg is your best bet - it handles screen capture and RTMP streaming out of the box. You capture your desktop and audio, then pipe everything straight to Twitch’s RTMP endpoint. Screen recording works through gdigrab on Windows or avfoundation on macOS. The real pain is audio mixing - getting system audio and mic input to play nice together. You’ll need multiple input sources and have to map the audio correctly. The command gets messy with all the encoding params, bitrates, and audio config. Took me forever to get video and audio synced properly. Performance was solid once I dialed it in, but CPU usage was higher than I thought it’d be.