How to create a stream with the Livepeer.com API

To create a stream, send a POST request to https://livepeer.com/api/stream.

Use the API key as a part of the authorization header, and use a JSON body to specify the configuration for the stream. The only parameter you are required to set is the name of your stream, but we also highly recommend that you define the profiles parameter with 720p, 480p and 360p renditions.

If you do not define transcoding rendition profiles when creating the stream, no transcoding will happen. Your playback video will have the attributes of the source stream only, will not take advantage of adaptive bitrate streaming and will likely buffer.

Here is an example request:

curl -X POST \
-H 'content-type: application/json' \
-H 'authorization: Bearer {api_key}' \
-d '{
  "name": "test_stream",
  "profiles": [
    {
      "name": "720p",
      "bitrate": 2000000,
      "fps": 30,
      "width": 1280,
      "height": 720
    },
    {
      "name": "480p",
      "bitrate": 1000000,
      "fps": 30,
      "width": 854,
      "height": 480
    },
    {
      "name": "360p",
      "bitrate": 500000,
      "fps": 30,
      "width": 640,
      "height": 360
    }
  ]
}' \
https://livepeer.com/api/stream

This is an example stream object response to the request above:

{
    "name":"test_stream",
    "profiles":[
        {"name":"720p","bitrate":2000000,"fps":30,"width":1280,"height":720},
        {"name":"480p","bitrate":1000000,"fps":30,"width":854,"height":480}],
        {"name":"360p","bitrate":500000,"fps":30,"width":640,"height":360}],
    "id":"0bf161f3-95bd-4971-a7b1-4dcb5d39e78a",
    "createdAt":1596081229373,
    "streamKey":"rlmn-uimq-jtgy-x98v",
    "playbackId":"emh3b2mxupongp5k"
}

streamKey, playbackId, and id (a.k.a. the stream ID) are unique to the stream object and important to remember.

Next, learn how to find your ingest and playback base URLs.

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How to create a stream with the Livepeer.com API