this post was submitted on 05 Apr 2026
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Given the recent controversies surrounding Discord and the fact that the end user is a product of Twitch, I wonder if there is any "bare bone" solution to stream my gaming session to a friend who's on Windows. I'd rather that they didn't have to do anything except clicking on a link or perhaps installing a piece of software but with no need to do any configuration. From their perspective, it should "just work.

On my side
Should I set up a webserver into which I feed an OBS stream? Or can perhaps ffmpeg work as a server on it's own? I'm on Arch Linux, playing games on Steam, within dwm within X11.

On my friend's side
No idea how a windows user is supposed to receive such a video feed.

Edit: text and voice chat, we're considering Signal for.

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[–] emotional_soup_88@programming.dev 3 points 16 hours ago (1 children)

Thanks! I just installed OBS - also trying out a few variants from the AUR - but it gave an error saying "couldn't load frontend-tools plugin", didn't recognize/pick up the Steam and/or the game's window, even though I tried the game in various screen modes, and WHIP wasn't in the streaming servers/sources selection section. I did some limited troubleshooting, but gave up, because my friend says they have Steam too. We'll try out Steam's "native" broadcasting function later tonight and see if we're satisfied with that + chat/voice chat through Signal.

Thanks for your time and input! :)

[–] Ooops@feddit.org 4 points 16 hours ago (1 children)

Oh, I assumed you already had setup OBS...

And WHIP is probably unneccessarily complicated anyway.

I was able to stream the output of my V4L2loopback-device (the virtual camera created with OBS' output) to a browser accessing localhost: with Motion without any setup other than creating a single-line config file defining the port...

Yeah, sorry, I was unclear on several parts in the post. Thanks anyways! If Steam's native broadcasting turns out to such, I'll try something else.