While I normally sport the well-worn fedora of a hard-boiled sysadmin, Sunday mornings I swap that neo-noir accessory for the tech-noir: a pair of pro headphones. This is the tale of the collision of those two roles. An educational caper, dear reader. You see, my weekly gig is to run a Facebook Live Stream, and Facebook just recently began enforcing a new policy: all video streams are required to use encryption. We have Fedora installed on the media machine, and use Open Broadcaster Software (OBS) to stream. It should have been easy to update the stream settings. I made the necessary changes and tested it out — no luck. The error message was less than helpful: “Failed to connect to server”. With a sigh, I took off my headphones, put my sysadmin hat on, and walked out into the digital darkness. It was time to get back to work.
What the RTMPS?
Some terms, before we dive in. RTMP is the Real Time Messaging Protocol, originally developed by Macromedia. Thanks to Adobe, a version of RTMP is now an open specification, and many video streaming services now use it to transport live audio and video across the internet. RTMPS is simply the encrypted version, where RTMP is wrapped inside a TLS/SSL connection. TLS, Transport Layer Security, is the same protocol that powers HTTPS. TLS does depend on your machine having a good copy of the certificate bundle, a collection of public keys that are considered to be trustworthy.
How does one go about trying to fix this sort of problem? A good first step is to get a more useful error message. Running OBS from a command line lets us see all the extra output messages that are usually invisible. Below I’ve cut out ..
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