About K409 / Dreamland

Saturday, November 04, 2023

K409 is an HLS livestream available at my experimental testing facility, https://dreamland.nodebay.com/

The stream is powered by my TVExecutive project (https://github.com/hqkirkland/TVExecNet/), which began as a Python project to automatically stream media collections to K409 based on a 7-day, 24-hour timetable. 

TVExecutive's implementation has been brought over into the (C#) .NET Framework, as a .NET Core Worker service.

WQTV (@eisei_win) is a Discord acquaintance who digtally collects retro VHS tapes and TV recordings. Every weekend, he jockeys a 48-72 hour stream of this content to a Discord voice channel.

I've learned to use the capabilities of ffmpeg's gdigrab utility, which I use to grab WQTV's stream from the region of Discord. The captured and cropped video is relayed to my HLS server that backs K409. To obtain audio, I've used the dshow input device to intercept the "Stereo Mix" which serves as an audio \input\ with data fed from the soundcard /output/. To obtain Stereo Mix as an input device, though, I had to install a Realtek audio device driver.

Another audio challenge I didn't foresee was that despite being a powerful Dell workstation/tower, there was a built-in speaker. In order to leave the stream running, without playing back locally-audible audio from Discord, I inserted a 3.5mm cable into the audio output jack to send the stream to a physically-null location.

Enjoy!