Running Catalyst Locally

First, select a directory for persisting your database and video content; in this example we will be using $HOME/livepeer-catalyst.

CATALYST_DIR="$HOME/livepeer-catalyst"
mkdir -p $CATALYST_DIR
docker run \
	-v $CATALYST_DIR:/data \
	--rm \
	-it \
	--name catalyst \
	--shm-size=4gb \
	-p 8888:8888 \
	-p 5432:5432 \
	-p 1935:1935 \
	-p 4242:4242 \
	-p 3478:3478 \
	-p 3478:3478/udp \
	-p 5349:5349 \
	-p 40000-40100:40000-40100/udp \
	livepeer/catalyst:next

You will be greeted with a very large amount of spam — give it a minute or so to boot up. You can then connect to your local box instance:

Address: http://localhost:8888
Email: admin@example.com
Password: livepeer

You can also access the MistServer dashboard to access some underlying livestreaming infrastructure:

Address: http://localhost:4242
Username: test
Password: test

To get you started, the database snapshot includes a few predefined streams.

For properly testing a livestream input comparable to OBS output, you will want a low-bitrate test file with no B-Frames and a short GOP length. Here’s a sample appropriately-formatted Big Buck Bunny file you can use. To stream in to your local box, you can use an ffmpeg command such as:

curl -LO https://test-harness-gcp.livepeer.fish/Big_Buck_Bunny_360p_1sGOP_NoBFrames.mp4
ffmpeg \
    -stream_loop \
    -1 \
    -re \
    -i Big_Buck_Bunny_360p_1sGOP_NoBFrames.mp4 \
    -c copy \
    -f flv \
    rtmp://localhost/live/2222-2222-2222-2222