Welcome to Livepeer.com's first video tutorial. In the following video clips, you'll learn how to create an account on livepeer.com, create your first stream object, install and setup OBS, stream into Livepeer.com, and watch your Livepeer.com-transcoded video. We'll be following our 

. It is recommended you have that open as you go through the video clips below.

Step 1: Create an account on Livepeer.com


Step 2: Verify your Livepeer.com account


Step 5: Stream into Livepeer.com using OBS


Select RTMP ingest and playback URL pair on livepeer.com stream page:

Thanks for watching our streaming video tutorial! We'd love to hear from you. Feel free to reach out to us at 

 with thoughts, suggestions, and any questions you might have.


Imagine you run an online comedy platform, a destination for in-the-moment, live humor video streams. Your users are individuals who find humor in everyday situations out on the street, in the office, at a restaurant…you name it, they find a way to capture it.

When your users spot a laugh-worthy situation, they expect to start streaming live using their mobile devices within seconds of taking their phones out of their pockets, or risk losing the opportunity to stream the moment.

Unfortunately, imagine your app takes 45 seconds on average to allow a user to start live streaming, as your transcoding provider needs the time to “boot up”. The start-up time delay causes your users to miss streaming humorous events, which in turn results in you losing users daily.

When it comes to time-sensitive live events, this transcoding session startup delay is a dealbreaker.

Many live streaming platforms need to get content out immediately to reduce video latency, but starting a new livestream can be a time consuming process.

Though latency can accrue at all different steps of the 

, including the video encoding pipeline, ingest operations, packaging operations, broadband transport speed, content delivery network (CDN), and video player, the process of starting a video’s encoding session can be one of the biggest contributors to end-to-end latency.

Typically, an encoding or transcoding session begins with an API call to a transcoding provider of choice. Even if one has programmatically configured this API call, and it happens instantaneously as the live video starts to be transmitted, it can take up to 40 seconds for encoding providers to assign the video to a working transcoder. The result - a video starting with 40 seconds of delay, or more,

ude latency added in other portions of the live video streaming workflow.

The reason for this delay can be largely attributed to transcoding server “boot up” time. Typically, transcoding providers use Google Cloud or AWS to run their encoding software and pay for virtual server space from said companies only when necessary. This translates to an infrastructure that “boots up” only when a transcoding request comes in, a process that involves setting up internal servers from a “server image” or a copy of the server with all necessary settings, data files, and application configurations to transcode your video.

An imperfect solution to this problem is to pay for and reserve as many servers as you think you might need 24/7. This is not recommended, as it would be a lot more expensive and a waste of computational resources.

Thanks to Livepeer’s global GPU infrastructure, reserving server space 24/7 for video transcoding is not a solution anyone needs to resort to anymore.

Livepeer leverages a readily available global network of always-on, incentivized transcoding providers that eliminate server boot-up latency from the video transcoding pipeline. Transcoding begins the moment a request hits our API, as there are always transcoders waiting and ready to take on transcoding “jobs.”

How are we able to provide instant, pay-as-you go transcoding?

Livepeer has discovered a new, underutilized source of transcoding capacity - cryptocurrency mining equipment. There are thousands of “mining farms” distributed all around the world, each equipped with thousands, or hundreds of thousands, of GPUs typically used for cryptocurrency mining. Within every one of these GPUs exists a video encoder card not currently being used.

Livepeer makes it possible for these data center operators to put their video encoder cards to use and turn on a lucrative new revenue stream with no additional cost or overhead. This new zero-cost revenue stream incentivizes these data center operators, or as they are more colloquially called, miners, to join the Livepeer transcoder network and provide excellent transcoding services to those who request them.

Thanks to this distributed network of always-on transcoders, Livepeer can transcode video segments much faster than realtime in just a few hundred milliseconds. Intelligent segment distribution and redundancies across the Livepeer network, in turn, ensure elegant fall back options in case of bad transcoder performance. In short, transcoding never stops.

Since Livepeer does not compete for the same cloud computing resources as Amazon or other transcoding providers, it can offer unique, cost-effective and flexible pricing based on transcoding usage, not on reserved server space. Cloud provider costs just can’t compete.

For more information on always-on transcoder access, our unique transcoding services, or any other questions you might have, send us a note to 

Livepeer's Always-On Transcoding Network

Our lives, from meaningful life events like birthdays, weddings, and baby showers, to work meetings, 

, have moved online this year. With change comes an opportunity to innovate - and that’s what we have done collectively as a world society amidst a global pandemic.

At Livepeer, we understand the increasing importance of capturing these meaningful moments, both for individuals and for companies riding this wave of digital innovation. We are therefore proud to announce the release of Livepeer.com stream recording, a feature much requested and anticipated.

This recording feature provides all Livepeer.com API and dashboard users with a .m3u8 and an MP4 link to an adaptive bitrate streaming (ABR) recording of their completed livestream. Playback is delivered via Livepeer.com's CDN by default.

To take advantage of this newly released feature, check out the guide below. The first section is for Livepeer.com users who create streams using the Livepeer.com Dashboard directly. The second section is for those who use the Livepeer.com API.

Please note: If you are using recording and OBS, be sure to change your keyframe interval to 2.

Using the Livepeer.com Dashboard to record streams

If you’re using the Livepeer.com Dashboard to 

, enabling recording is as simple as checking the 

 button in your individual stream page. The URL for your individual stream page should look something like this:

https://livepeer.com/app/stream/12345678-ab40-429d-a714-0e0fd4ab0abc.

 button is located immediately below the 

 is checked, future streaming sessions will be recorded and stored by Livepeer.com. The session recording playback URL will be available about 5 minutes after the live stream ends and will appear in the session table at the bottom of the stream page.

Using the Livepeer.com API to record streams

If you do not have a Livepeer.com account or an API key follow step 1 in this 

Before learning how to make a simple API request to turn recording on for streaming, we need to understand the Livepeer.com API 

 object is a single live streaming session.

 object shows the configuration and metadata totals of all its 

 means that new sessions are not recorded

 means that the session is actively being recorded or was recorded.

 means that the session is not being recorded or was not recorded.

To create a new recording-enabled stream:

, and details about which video profiles or renditions you’d like to transcode your stream into. See step 3 in this 

Sample response of stream with recording turned on:

To enable recording for existing streams:

 value is inherited by all future child-session 

To check if recording is enabled on an existing stream:

 object. A common use case is to request all recorded sessions with the same 

. For example, a user generated content (UGC) video platform may create a 

 object for each UGC live streamer and then want to show an archive of all recorded livestream sessions for each live streamer.

The playback URL for a livestream session recording will not be available until approximately 5 minutes after the livestream has ended.

Once the recording is ready, the session 

 parameter will return the .m3u8 recording playback URL. Additionally, the session 

 will return an .mp4 recording playback URL. 

The recording playback URL will look something like this: 

https://region-cdn.livepeer.com/recordings/<id-of-stream-session>/index.m3u8

. View the live stream with any HLS video player.

For more detailed information on stream recording or to ask any questions, share your thoughts, or make any kind of suggestion, feel free to get in touch at 

Video Tutorial : Stream into Livepeer for the First Time

Step 1: Create an account on Livepeer.com

Step 2: Verify your Livepeer.com account

Step 3: Create your first stream

Step 4: Install and setup OBS

Step 5: Stream into Livepeer.com using OBS

Step 6: Watch your transcoded video

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Livepeer's Always-On Transcoding Network

Livepeer's New Stream Recording & MP4 Download Features

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