City Council to YouTube
Thanks to qntmpkts on GitHub for the initial confirmation this is possible to take a HLS stream (m3u8) and send it to YouTube: https://gist.github.com/qntmpkts/403a027a4bfe99812ebf8952c41f8789
Also check out ffmpeg’s documenation page on this: https://trac.ffmpeg.org/wiki/EncodingForStreamingSites
ffmpeg -re -i protocol://domain.tld/stream.m3u8 -c:v copy -c:a aac -ar 44100 -ab 128k -ac 2 -strict -2 -flags +global_header -bsf:a aac_adtstoasc -bufsize 3000k -f mp4 "rtmp://a.rtmp.youtube.com/live2/<STREAMNAME/KEY>"
Calgary City Council Stream
Current Link: https://lin12.isilive.ca/live/calgarycc/live/chunklist.m3u8 (The 12 in the URL can change as there are multiple servers)
This link can be found most easily by going to https://video.isilive.ca/play/calgarycc/live and then looking at the network tab in your browser to find the m3u8 URL it’s hitting.
Codec Details
HLS H264 (Main), yuv420p, 1080p AAC 48hz
ffmpeg -re -i https://lin12.isilive.ca/live/calgarycc/live/chunklist.m3u8 -c:v copy -c:a aac -ar 44100 -ab 128k -ac 2 -strict -2 -flags +global_header -bufsize 3000k -f flv "rtmp://a.rtmp.youtube.com/live2/STREAM_KEY"
Test to local file
ffmpeg -re -i https://lin12.isilive.ca/live/calgarycc/live/chunklist.m3u8 -c:v copy -c:a aac -ar 44100 -ab 128k -ac 2 -strict -2 -flags +global_header -bsf:a aac_adtstoasc -bufsize 3000k -f mp4 test30seconds.mp4
Test local file to YouTube
ffmpeg -re -i test30seconds.mp4 -c:v copy -c:a copy -strict -2 -flags +global_header -bufsize 3000k -f flv "rtmp://a.rtmp.youtube.com/live2/STREAM_KEY"
Downloading a previous day’s stream
Don’t use ffmpeg since we aren’t needing to copy/transcode. youtube-dl is great.
youtube-dl -f 0 --hls-prefer-native https://vod.isilive.ca/nospace/hls/calgary/Council-_-Primary_Public-_-Hearing-_-Meeting-_-of-_-Council_2024-05-02-11-21.mp4/index.m3u8
Notes from trying this
- The audio starts to fall apart whenever the stream switches after a long break. This is fixed by ensuring you re-encode the audio to aac like the original snippet.
Other options
Other folks recommend using OBS to take the input and send to YouTube and then have more control over the stream.