How to livestream a webcam to YouTube with FFmpeg?

Question

I want to send the livestream of my webcam to YouTube. I can follow YouTube's guide up to step 8. "Stream Connection" tells me there is "No data" and the button "Go Live" remains unclickable. A screenshot of this situation can be seen at

As encoding software, I was planning on using FFmpeg because it can run from the target platform, a Raspberry Pi with Raspbian. A USB webcam supported by video4linux2 is used.

FFmpeg's wiki shows that streaming a file can be done with the following:

ffmpeg -re -i input.mkv \
-c:v libx264 -preset veryfast -maxrate 3000k \
-bufsize 6000k -pix_fmt yuv420p -g 50 -c:a aac -b:a 160k -ac 2 \
-ar 44100 -f flv rtmp://live.twitch.tv/app/<stream key>

I modified this command in the following ways: 1. It takes the video stream from the webcam with -f v4l2 -i /dev/video0. 2. It does not broadcast any audio with -an. 3. It broadcasts to YouTube's RTMP server, rtmp://a.rtmp.youtube.com/live2/<stream key>

The final version of the command is now:

RTMP_URL="rtmp://a.rtmp.youtube.com/live2"
STREAM_KEY="secr-etse-cret-secr"
OUTPUT=$RTMP_URL/$STREAM_KEY
ffmpeg -re -f v4l2 -i /dev/video0 \
-c:v libx264 -preset veryfast -maxrate 3000k \
-bufsize 6000k -pix_fmt yuv420p -g 50 -an \
-f flv $OUTPUT

When I run this command, I would expect that "Stream connection" would change to something else than "No data" after a few seconds, but that does not happen.

I have tried recording the stream to a local file with:

ffmpeg -re -f v4l2 -i /dev/video0 \
-c:v libx264 -preset veryfast -maxrate 3000k \
-bufsize 6000k -pix_fmt yuv420p -g 50 -an \
-f flv test.flv

This worked fine. That demonstrates to me that the issue is with getting the video stream accepted by YouTube.

As szatmary suggests you need to add audio. You can do so with the anullsrc filter: `ffmpeg -re -f v4l2 -i /dev/video0 -re -f lavfi -i anullsrc ...` — llogan, Aug 19 '19 at 18:10

Abayomi Israel · Answer 1 · 2023-07-06T22:46:20.603

The code below works very well using Windows, you may adjust to fit for your need

ffmpeg -loglevel debug -threads:v 2 -threads:a 8 -filter_threads 2 \
       -thread_queue_size 512  -f dshow -i video="HP Wide Vision HD" \
       -f dshow -i audio="Microphone Array (Realtek Audio)" -pix_fmt yuv420p \
       -c:v libx264 -qp:v 19 -profile:v high -rc:v cbr_ld_hq -level:v 4.2 \
       -r:v 60 -g:v 120 -bf:v 3 -refs:v 16 \
       -f flv rtmp://youtube_stream_url/stream_key

How to livestream a webcam to YouTube with FFmpeg?

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