Hello,  I like to use OBS to "record" HLS video for live streaming using the custom ffmpeg output:


[URL unfurl="true"]https://obsproject.com/forum/resources/how-to-do-hls-streaming-in-obs-open-broadcast-studio.945/[/URL]


This works really great for my use case, the only problem is I only get one HLS quality level, ideally I could configure multiple qualities to offer the best possible experience to my stream viewers. I'm well aware that usually the multiple quality levels are generated on the "streaming server" side after the video has been encoded by OBS & shipped to the streaming server over RTMP.


I'm particularly interested in self-hosted video streaming ala owncast and peertube. IMO, for those use cases,  it would make much more sense to do ALL of the video encoding work on the streaming PC, in order to reduce the load / system requirements on the streaming server.

I have been doing research and I haven't found a way to configure this in OBS yet. I'm willing to do custom development to make it work I just don't know where to start.


I made a post about it at the bottom of this new feature ideas thread: https://ideas.obsproject.com/posts/41/multiple-video-outputs-selective-recording-iso-recording


Here are some ideas I had:


1. Use some internal OBS API functions that are not exposed in the user interface

OR

2. Write a plugin to create/expose more fine grained control 

OR

3. Modify OBS to create/expose more fine grained control 


Obviously #1 would be preferred. #2 would be ok, and I would really like to avoid #3


Once I figure out a strategy of how to expand whats possible for me to configure in OBS, there are a couple different goals I can work towards:


A. Come up with a way to customize the FFMPEG configuration / commandline so that it supports multiple outputs ala:

[URL unfurl="true"]https://trac.ffmpeg.org/wiki/Creating%20multiple%20outputs[/URL]

OR

B. Come up with a way to output the raw video stream (not encoded) from OBS to an external FFMPEG instance that I have more control over.

This would be like the "Lossless Quality, Tremendously Large File Size" option, but instead of recording to a file, it would go over RTMP or otherwise get piped into an external FFMPEG process.