Hypcast

Hypcast is a web-based multi-party live television streamer based on GStreamer and Pion WebRTC, designed to work with TV tuner hardware on Linux hosts. Start it up, click a channel, and stream live TV from wherever you are. Connect with another device and share a perfectly synchronized live stream, even as you change channels.

Please note…

• Hypcast is a personal project with a limited feature set that meets my specific needs. It is made available to the public in the event that it might be useful to others, however I provide no guarantees about maintenance, functionality, or backwards compatibility. For example, flags and environment variables used to configure the server may break at any time.
• This is version 2 of Hypcast, a complete rewrite of the original project using a radically different implementation and providing a completely new user interface. The original version of Hypcast remains available at https://github.com/ahamlinman/hypcast-v1, but is not maintained.

Setup Guidelines

There are no "official" instructions or support for running Hypcast, but if you're willing to work through it and try it out here are some general guidelines.

Hypcast requires a supported ATSC tuner card, along with a channels.conf file providing tuning information. The w_scan2 utility can generate this file. For example, to scan for over-the-air channels within the United States:

w_scan2 -f a -c us -X > channels.conf

If you're okay with a software-based transcoding pipeline, it's probably easiest to run Hypcast using the container image published at ghcr.io/ahamlinman/hypcast:latest, with the following configuration:

• TV tuner devices passed through with --device /dev/dvb
• channels.conf placed at /etc/hypcast/channels.conf inside the container, e.g. by putting it at this location on the host and passing -v /etc/hypcast:/etc/hypcast:ro
• Host networking enabled with --net host, to allow WebRTC connections to the server without NAT traversal (which Hypcast does not support); the -addr flag can configure the server port if necessary (default :9200)

Alternatively, if you want to enable hardware accelerated video processing through VA-API (which the container image does not support), you can install and configure GStreamer and gstreamer-vaapi on your own system, then build and run the Hypcast binary yourself with -video-pipeline vaapi. See the Makefile for details of how to build a Hypcast binary with embedded client assets for convenience.

Hypcast is not designed to be exposed to the Internet! It is expected to run on a fast local network, or perhaps over a private VPN. Allowing public access could present security issues and/or violate laws in your jurisdiction (be advised that I am not a legal professional, that the suggestion of this possibility does not constitute legal advice, and that as a user you are fully responsible for ensuring that your personal usage of Hypcast complies with relevant local laws).

Potential Improvements

• The UI could use some additional work to ensure robustness against failures, e.g. automatic reconnection if the server restarts or whatever.
• There are no controls for data rate and encoding quality like version 1 had. Ideally these would adjust automatically based on connection quality, possibly with some way for clients to request a lower quality to save data. I don't expect this to be trivial to implement.
• The system does not support any form of NAT between the server and client, including typical container networking implementations. This would require configuring a STUN server.
• The UI is currently hardcoded to connect over insecure WebSockets.
• Closed captions are not supported.