Feasibility of bypassing RTMP entirely and relaying an external HLS source instead?

[caturria]

Hi,

Thank you very much for your work on this fantastic project.

I'm using Owncast for a private/ hobby project I keep coming back to every couple of years. Basically I'm trying to do private movie nights that feel like scheduled movie screenings. Virtual cinema, if you will; the movie is an event that takes place at a scheduled time whether viewers are present or not. I have my own custom playout tool that resides on the same server as the Owncast instance, and it pushes the stream out at the scheduled time. As a blind person, I very much appreciate having a tool like Owncast to provide the front-end for me so I can just focus on my backend tool.

I currently opt for just one passthrough source, because I want to do the encoding in advance, do it at high quality ("veryslow" Libx264 preset) and avoid the trade-offs between quality and computational expense at showtime. But this use case would benefit from being able to avoid RTMP altogether, because then I could render all sorts of pre-encoded bitrates in advance and get high-quality adaptive streaming.

My question is two-fold:

1. Do you have any plans to support an external passthrough HLS input URL as an alternative to RTMP in the future?

2. is there currently a way to make Owncast think a stream is online when no RTMP source is connected?

It occurs to me that if I were to place a reverse proxy in front of Owncast, I could override the stream endpoint and serve my external content instead. As long as the stream is sane, the player should be none the wiser, I should think?

Golang is not a language I know, but I did do a bit of digging to see what I could figure out with respect to stream status. I see that setStreamAsConnected in streamState.go does several things:

1. Sets up stats and current broadcast settings;
2. StopOfflineCleanupTimer() and startOnlineCleanupTimer(), which appear to be responsible for cleaning up old segments as the stream progresses?
3. Sets up the YP directory service, storage and transcoder;
4. Calls webhooks, starts thumbnail generation and dispatches chat welcome messages/ notifications.

Were I to omit the transcoder and thumbnail parts (since Owncast isn't generating the output in this scenario), stop both timers (since there's nothing to clean up here) and just do everything else (in response to an API call or some such instead of an RTMP connection), would you expect it to work? Other than thumbnail generation, what else if anything would you expect to break?

Thank you in advance for your advice.