📺 HackTVLive: Amateur TV With OBS!

Hey Everyone! 🎙️

Ever wanted to broadcast your OBS Studio stream directly to an old-school analog TV? 🤔 Dust off those NTSC sets, because HackTVLive makes it super easy to go live on RF using nothing but OBS a HackRF and a simple command line tool! 🔌🖥️➡️📺

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What is HackTVLive? 🛠️

HackTVLive is a Go-powered wrapper around the awesome hacktv project. It listens for a live RTMP stream (just like OBS outputs!) and transforms your digital broadcast into a real NTSC analog TV signal. All you need is a HackRF and a little know-how. 🏗️

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How Does It Work? 🤓

Let’s break it down step by step:

1. OBS Studio sends your live stream to a local RTMP server (rtmp://localhost:1935/live/stream). You just add it as a custom output in OBS! 🎥
2. HackTVLive uses ffmpeg to:

• Listen for your RTMP stream
• Scale and format your video (auto-detects OBS settings, but you can override with environment variables)
• Optionally include or disable audio 🎵🔇

1. ffmpeg pipes your video directly into hacktv, which:

• Encodes it for NTSC broadcast 📡
• Outputs the analog signal, ready for transmission

1. That’s it! Your stream pops up on your analog TV, live and in glorious fuzz. 😎

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Quick Start Guide 🏃‍♂️

1. Set up OBS:

• Add a new Custom Streaming Server output:
  rtmp://localhost:1935/live/stream

1. Run HackTVLive:
   Use the command line like this:

   ./transmitter --freq 471.25 --audio=true

• --freq: The frequency in MHz you want to transmit on (required)
• --audio: Enable or disable audio (default: true) Example with no audio:

   ./transmitter --freq 471.25 --audio=false

3. Advanced Tweaks:
   HackTVLive supports environment variables so you can control scaling, framerate, or pixel format:

• SCALE_WIDTH & SCALE_HEIGHT: Custom resolution
• FPS: Frames per second (default: 15)
• PIX_FMT: Pixel format (default: yuv420p)

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Current Limitations & Roadmap 🛤️

• NTSC only (for now!)
  PAL and other analog standards coming soon! We’re working to make all of hacktv’s flags accessible so you can choose your format and get creative.

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Why Use HackTVLive? 🤷

• Simple setup: No manual piping or scripting—just one binary!
• Flexible scaling: Adapts to your OBS output, or lets you tweak it with env vars.
• Live analog streaming: Perfect for retro events, signal experiments, or just showing off to your friends!

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Get Started!

Check out the code and contribute on GitHub:
👉 SarahRoseLives/HackTVLive

Ready to bring your digital stream back to analog life? Give it a try and let us know how it works on your bench! 🔬📡

Happy streaming!