LiveU Competitors: Use Speedify to Bond Internet Connections for Live Streaming with No Dedicated Hardware Needed

Raspberry Pi Powered Bonding Router with Speedify Software

Shopping the LiveU competitor list gets repetitive fast. Almost every option is another hardware box with SIM slots, a four-figure price and a subscription behind it, and what you are paying for is the ability to send one stream over several mobile networks at the same time.

Speedify offers that ability as software, spreading a single stream across 4G/5G cellular data, Wi-Fi, wired Ethernet and Starlink, and it will run on a Raspberry Pi you assemble yourself.

The parts list ahead builds exactly that portable unit, with the Miri X510 as the ready-made option – speak to Speedify before your organization buys anything.

LiveU Competitors: What to Look At

First – for the “computer” core of the streaming gear, you should make sure it can combine multiple connections at once. Look for channel bonding or link aggregations.

In our example, we installed Speedify on a Raspberry Pi 4. With Speedify, we have the only VPN capable of software channel bonding, so we were able to incorporate the bonding part of the technology right off the bat.

Then, there are 3 main processes you have to get working:

1. Getting video from the camera into the main streaming device. 
2. Turning that raw live video footage into a streamable format. 
3. Broadcasting it over the Internet using channel bonding technology. You also have to make sure you can control the stream without a user interface.

Speedify Powered LiveU Competitor Solution for Network Bonding: Components List

Below you’ll find a sample list of components we used in our LiveU live streaming gear competitor. As long as you find similar hardware with the same functionalities, you should be good to go.

The total cost for this live streaming equipment is about $600. Plus – you may not need to purchase all of this equipment if you already have similar items available.

LiveU Competitors: Easier Live Streaming on the Go with Speedify

As mentioned before, one of the core elements of this live streaming gear is the Speedify channel bonding VPN. You can easily set up Speedify on any Windows, macOS, iOS, Android or Linux device. For Raspberry Pi use the instructions here.

Along with that, on our Pi setup we’re using ffmpeg, which is a fast, lightweight, very configurable open-source software suite available on Linux for video and audio encoding and decoding.  We installed ffmpeg by following these compilation steps https://trac.ffmpeg.org/wiki/CompilationGuide/Ubuntu. We installed every third party library listed except for libaom, since it is unstable and not necessary for our setup. 

And then – depending on the operating system your main device uses – you can install various software like OBS, etc.

We also needed to set up the Circuit Playground Express to work as a remote to control the stream. This involved writing a couple of Python scripts so that one button starts the live stream, one button stops it, and the switch reboots the Pi if needed. We have our code to set up the streaming buttons available on Github with more detailed setup instructions here: https://github.com/speedify/rpi-streaming-experiment.

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Get the Speedify Powered Live Streaming Gear Live

After you assemble all the hardware parts and install the required software, you should be ready to go for live streaming. As mentioned earlier, it depends on the device how you can get started.

In our example, we spent some time testing a ffmpeg command that would stream high quality video as reliably as we can to Twitch on the Pi, which we programmed into the Circuit Playground Express remote (see the GitHub link above): 

ffmpeg_command = “ffmpeg -nostdin -re -f v4l2 -s ‘1280×720’ -framerate 24 -i /dev/video0 -f alsa -ac 2 -i hw:CARD=Link,DEV=0 -vcodec libx264 -framerate 24 -rtbufsize 1500k -s 1280×720 -preset ultrafast -pix_fmt yuv420p -crf 17 -force_key_frames ‘expr:gte(t,n_forced*2)’ -minrate 850k -maxrate 1000k -b:v 1000k -bufsize 1000k -acodec libmp3lame -rtbufsize 1500k -b 96k -ar 44100 -f flv – | ffmpeg -f flv -i – -c copy -f flv -drop_pkts_on_overflow 1 -attempt_recovery 1 -recovery_wait_time 1 ‘rtmp://live.twitch.tv/app/” + streamKey + “‘\n”

This command (included in the Pythin script mentioned above) lets us stream live to Twitch, in 720p at 24 frames per second, which is about as good as the Pi can handle. We’ve also tested it at 1080p and up to 60 frames per second, but the performance is not as reliable and the Pi is more at risk of overheating.

With our gear, Speedify bonding is set to automatic start so it runs as soon as the Pi boots up. This way, we don’t need a UI for the Pi once we get everything together. 

And that’s all there is to it! Ready to try our LiveU competitor for live streaming?

Looking for an Out-of-the-Box Network Bonding Router as an Alternative to LiveU? Get the Miri X510!

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