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Bilbycast Bilbycast

Getting Started

Bilbycast is a suite of Rust projects for professional broadcast media transport. Edge nodes move live video and audio between locations; the manager is the web UI that controls them; the relay traverses NAT between sites that can’t reach each other directly.

Components

Section titled “Components”
ComponentRole
bilbycast-managerWeb UI + API. Controls edge nodes and relays. Where you click to make things happen.
bilbycast-edgeMedia transport gateway. Bridges SRT, RIST, RTP, UDP, RTMP, RTSP, HLS, CMAF, WebRTC, and SMPTE ST 2110. In-process transcoding and local-display playout.
bilbycast-relayStateless QUIC relay for NAT traversal between edge sites.
bilbycast-appear-x-api-gatewaySidecar that bridges Appear X devices into the manager.

A few helper crates (bilbycast-srt, bilbycast-rist, bilbycast-fdk-aac-rs, bilbycast-ffmpeg-video-rs, bilbycast-bonding) ship inside the edge — you don’t install them separately.

Architecture

Section titled “Architecture”
                    ┌─────────────────────┐
                    │  bilbycast-manager   │
                    │  (Web UI + API)      │
                    └────────┬────────────┘
                             │ WebSocket (wss://)
              ┌──────────────┼──────────────┐
              │              │              │
     ┌────────▼───────┐  ┌──▼──────────┐  ┌▼────────────────┐
     │ bilbycast-edge  │  │ bilbycast-  │  │ bilbycast-edge   │
     │ (Site A)        │  │ relay       │  │ (Site B)         │
     └────────┬────────┘  └──┬──────────┘  └┬────────────────┘
              │              │              │
              └──────────────┘──────────────┘
                    QUIC tunnels (encrypted)

Edge nodes connect outbound to the manager — devices behind NAT or restrictive firewalls don’t need any inbound port.

What you’ll do

Section titled “What you’ll do”

A typical first deployment takes about 20 minutes and looks like this:

  1. Install the manager — one command brings up Postgres + the binary as a systemd service, and you log in to the web UI.
  2. Install the relay — only if your sites can’t reach each other directly. Skip otherwise.
  3. Install an edge node — download, run, then point a browser at the setup wizard to register it with the manager. No hand-edited config files.
  4. Create your first flow — point-and-click in the manager UI: add an input, add an output, click Save.

For a high-level view of the deployment topology and firewall flows, see the Deployment overview.