How 24/7 playout from a video library works

A 24/7 channel plays videos from a library one after another, around the clock, as one continuous live stream pushed to YouTube, Twitch or your own site. It works reliably when every video is first converted to one house format, a schedule is always filled well ahead, and the playout restarts by itself if anything stops.

Step 1: one house format

Platforms and players expect one unbroken stream. If clip A is 1080p at 25 frames per second and clip B is 720p at 30, the stream changes shape at the join and many players reset or freeze. So each video is converted once, when it is added, to the channel's format: same resolution, frame rate, codec and audio layout. Converting a 52-second 480p clip to 1080p took 37 seconds on 8 cores with x264 at the veryfast preset.

Step 2: a schedule that refills itself

A schedule turns the library into a timeline: what plays at 14:00, what follows. Keeping two days filled ahead means a short outage of the scheduler never empties the channel, and anyone can see what will be on air later.

Step 3: one continuous encoder

The naive approach starts a new upload for each clip, and viewers see the stream stop at every boundary. A single long-running process that reads the clips in order and sends one continuous stream avoids that: because the clips already share a format, it can join them without re-encoding, which is why a channel costs only a few percent of a core.

Step 4: recover by itself

Networks drop and platforms reset connections. The playout should be watched and restarted automatically, and someone emailed when a channel needs attention, rather than discovered off air the next morning.

Bandwidth

A channel sends all day. A Full HD channel at about 8 Mbit/s sends roughly 2.6 TB a month to each platform it plays on. Check your server plan's monthly allowance before starting several.