If you’re on Firefox on desktop/laptop, check out Bypass Paywall [0]. It was removed from the firefox add-on store due to a DMCA claim [1], but can be manually installed (and auto updates) from gitlab. The dev even provides instructions on how to add custom filters to uBlock Origin [2], so you don’t have to add another extension but still get some benefit.
If you’re on Android and use Firefox, you can use the Disable JavaScript extension to disable JS on sites with paywalls, like NYtimes. While not perfect, it works remarkably well.
With all the helpful comments shared in this thread, I’m starting to realize that this approach is likely the only viable solution.
Previously when doing my research, I was naive enough that when people said “…30W at idle”, it was specifically for their GPU, and not for their whole system. So now things makes a lot more sense.
I’m using Frigate with a Google Coral connected to Home Assistant, it’d send an image and a short video to a Telegram group with my wife whenever it detects a person.
I’m using OpenIPC firmware flashed on a chinese Goke camera and works great. It connects to Frigate using RTMP.
Not much you can select for with desktop parts. Maybe get dual Ethernet now so you don’t want to add a card later. And more disks, more power so one bigger drive is better than two smaller…
Might be better to suspend it, and wake on lan when you want to play.
Linux is fun! Of course it’s doable. At first you’ll have a hard time and need to look up everything at ddg or whatever. But you’ll learn a lot. Go in small steps. One thing at a time. And envision the feeling you’ll get when you succeed!
I recently set up a personal Owncast instance on my home server, it should do what you’re looking for. I use OBS Studio to stream random stuff to friends, if your webcam can send RTMP streams it should be able to stream to Owncast without OBS in the middle - else, you just need to set up OBS to capture from the camera and stream to Owncast over RTMP.
the communication itself should be encrypted
I suggest having the camera/OBS and Owncast on the same local network as RTMP is unencrypted and could possibly be intercepted between the source and the Owncast server, so make sure it happens over a reasonably “trusted” network. From there, my reverse proxy (apache) serves the owncast instance to the Internet over HTTPS (using let’s encrypt or self-signed certs), so it is encrypted between the server and clients. You can watch the stream from any web browser, or use another player such as VLC pointing to the correct stream address [1]
it seems that I might need to self-host a VPN to achieve this
Owncast itself offers no authentication mechanism to watch the stream, so if you expose this to the internet directly and don’t want it public, you’d have to implement authentication at the reverse proxy level (HTTP Basic auth), or as you said you may set up a VPN server (I use wireguard) on the same machine as the Owncast instance and only expose the instance to the VPN network range (with the VPN providing the authentication layer). If you go for a VPN between your phone and owncast server, there’s also no real need to setup HTTPS at the reverseproxy level (as the VPN already provides encryption)
Of course you should also forward the correct ports (VPN or HTTPS) from your home/ISP router to the server on your LAN.
I’d go for HLS due to its simplicity: just files over http(s). VPN or not - depends on your network. If your machine is accessible from the internet, just putting the files into a webserver subdirectory with a long random path and using https will be secure enough for the usecase. Can be done with an ffmpeg oneliner.
The downside of HLS is the lag (practically – 10s or more, maybe 5 if you squeeze it hard). It is in no way realtime. Webrtc does it better (and other things too), but it is also a bigger pain to set up and forward.
Also, just in case, test that the webcam works fine if left active 24/7. I had (a cheapo) one that required a powercycle after a week or so…
selfhosted
Newest
This magazine is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.