onion-livestreaming

Recipe for livestreaming over the Tor network

This was originally made for fun over the course of five days and hence sloppiness may pervade (especially in the CSS).

Dependencies

• Flask
• captcha
• Flask-HTTPAuth (to identify the broadcaster in chat)
• Flask-Compress (should probably be optional)
• Knowledge of FFmpeg and Tor

Features

• Twitch-looking web interface
• Change stream title as you're streaming
• Viewer count
• Stream on/off indicator (and with JavaScript, playback error messages with prompts to refresh)
• Chat with custom names & tripcodes
• Ban chatters / hide messages
• Flood detection / liberal captcha
• Almost works without JavaScript

Issues

• JavaScript required for HLS playback (this is being worked on)
• CSS is spaghetti (e.g. the PureCSS framework is used sometimes when it might not need be)
• Fonts are hard-coded and you might not have them
• AFAIK the FFmpeg command in stream.sh only works on Linux, change it for other OSs
• Stream delay of at least 40 seconds. Hopefully this will decrease when congestion control gets into Tor: https://youtu.be/watch?v=zQDbfHSjbnI
• Most of the code is in app.py; it should be split into several files with more narrow purposes.

How it works

• FFmpeg creates an HLS stream,
• Flask creates a website interface for the stream,
• tor makes the website accessible at an onion address

Explanation of the FFmpeg command in stream.sh

TODO

See https://www.martin-riedl.de/2018/08/24/using-ffmpeg-as-a-hls-streaming-server-part-1/ https://www.martin-riedl.de/2018/08/24/using-ffmpeg-as-a-hls-streaming-server-part-2/ as stream.sh are based on that.

Tutorial

To run this yourself, get this source code. As the project currently exists you might need to change some things:

• If you're on Windows stream.sh will be wrong for you and so will all the fonts in app.py.
• If you're on macOS stream.sh might need to be changed a bit and you might not have the fonts in app.py.
• If you're on Linux stream.sh will probably be alright but you might not have all the fonts in app.py.

Lots of the stuff in app.py and stream.sh should at some point be moved into a configuration file that you can edit more easily.

Assuming you've dealt with that, this is what you have to do.

FFmpeg

Go to the project root and type sh stream.sh. This starts the livestream.

Flask

Go to the project root and type flask run. This starts the websever.

tor

Now your webserver is running on port 5000 (or whichever port you set it to, if you did that). We need to tell tor to create a hidden service and to point it at port 5000.

In your torrc, add these two lines

HiddenServiceDir $PROJECT_ROOT/hidden_service
HiddenServicePort 80 127.0.0.1:5000

where $PROJECT_ROOT is the root folder of this project. When you reload tor it will create the hidden_service directory and your website will be online. Your onion address is in hidden_service/hostname.