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How to Start a Live Stream in Castr
How to Start a Live Stream in Castr

How to create a new live stream project. You’ll also explore the features to optimize your stream.

Govinda Sunil avatar
Written by Govinda Sunil
Updated over a week ago

Use this guide to create a live stream project to stream to your website with embed player and multistream to 30+ social platforms at once.

In this article

Create a new Live Stream

1. Log in to your Castr account

2. If you don’t have any streams created yet, click Create New > All in One Stream.

Note: If you’re on the 7-day trial period, click Activate Trial.

3. Give your stream a name and choose the closest ingest location
For example, if you’re located in Brazil, then choose South America. If you’re located in Chicago, then choose US East

Then click Create All in One Stream. You’ll be directed to the stream dashboard.

What’s in the dashboard?

This is your control center of the Live Stream. Here you can find your stream key, configure your streaming software and encoder, get an embed URL, and so on.

Preview player

Once you start sending your stream to Castr, you’ll be able to see it live in the preview player.

Publish, Pull, and Webcam modes

  • Publish: Stream directly from your hardware/software encoder to Castr. To connect Castr with your encoder, you can choose between the RTMP URL and Streaming Key or the SRT URL.

Click HERE to see our guide on how to connect Castr with OBS Studio, and HERE for the differences between RTMP and SRT.

  • Pull: Castr can pull HLS, RTMP, RTSP, MPEG-TS streams from other sources. Paste the URL in Pull mode and your stream will appear in Castr.

  • Webcam: Use your device's webcam (video and audio) to start streaming right away without having to setup an encoder.

Add publish destinations

In your stream dashboard, click Add Platforms to add publish destinations

Publish destinations are the platforms that you want to stream live on simultaneously. The number of destinations you can add depends on your subscription plan.

Choose your preference from the list. If your platform is not on our list, click Custom to add a platform using the RTMP or SRT addresses.

To add another platform, repeat these steps. Then toggle the platforms on.

Iframe and Embed URL

You can get the iframe and embed code and embed the player in any of your web pages.

  • Video + Audio: The streaming player will have both the video and audio from your video source

  • Audio only: The streaming player will only have the audio from your video source

Analytics

View all traffic data received from your livestream. Learn more about Castr Analytics in this article.

You can also monitor the health of input feed from encoder to Castr. You can learn more about stream health charts here.

Live to VOD

Your livestreams are auto-recorded and auto-saved in this tab. You can convert these recordings into videos on demand content and re-stream them through Castr.

To see the details of the Live to VOD tab, please refer to this tutorial.

Paywall

You can use our Paywall for monetizing for livestreams. Castr takes no percentage from your income. You can learn more about it here.

Advertising

You can use this feature to add in-stream ads. You can upload the video and decide when the ad will play on your stream. You can learn more about advertising here.

Settings

This is where you can set up the stream HTML5 player as your preferences.

  • Player Interface

    • Player Theme color: Change the theme color of the stream player

    • Display Event Countdown: Display the countdown for when your stream will go live

    • Display Number of viewers: Enable this to show the number of real-time viewers in the stream player

    • Custom Embed Poster and Embed Watermark: Add your own poster and watermark to customize the stream player

  • Player Functions

    • Autoplay Embed player: Enable this to autoplay the stream when the web page finished loading

    • Enable Adaptive Bitrate Transcoding: Enable this to turn on Adaptive Bitrate Transcoding for the stream player

    • Embed Player Rewind: Enable this to allow rewinding the stream in case your viewers want to go back during the livestream. You can select up to 4 hours of rewind.

    • Enable Google Analytics: Get better insights into your stream by connecting Castr with Google Analytics. Learn more

    • Enable Chat: Enable this to turn on the chat box in the stream player

    • Enable Player Events: This will allow you to catch play/pause events of the player. This feature is for developers.

    • Publish this Stream on OTT app: Once we have published your OTT app upon request, you can add your stream to be published on your OTT app. You can learn more about it here.

  • Security: Secure your content with password protection, geo/country-blocking, geo-country whitelisting, and domain whitelisting.

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