Build from Source

Pre-built binaries cover most cases — see the per-product getting-started pages first. Build from source only if you need a feature flag combination the release matrix doesn’t ship, or you want to follow the development branch.

What you’ll need

• A Linux host with Rust stable (edition 2024 — install via rustup.rs).
• The build-time apt packages below.
• Roughly 5 GB of disk for the workspace + build artefacts.

Clone the workspace

The edge has several path-dependency sibling crates that must live in the same parent directory before it can compile:

git clone https://github.com/Bilbycast/bilbycast-libsrt-rs.git --recurse-submodules   # SRT backend (the only one)
git clone https://github.com/Bilbycast/bilbycast-fdk-aac-rs.git --recurse-submodules
git clone https://github.com/Bilbycast/bilbycast-ffmpeg-video-rs.git --recurse-submodules
git clone https://github.com/Bilbycast/bilbycast-rist.git
git clone https://github.com/Bilbycast/bilbycast-bonding.git
git clone https://github.com/Bilbycast/bilbycast-mxl-rs.git --recurse-submodules
git clone https://github.com/Bilbycast/bilbycast-decklink-rs.git
git clone https://github.com/Bilbycast/bilbycast-rga-rs.git
git clone https://github.com/Bilbycast/bilbycast-edge.git
git clone https://github.com/Bilbycast/bilbycast-relay.git

Clone all of them before you build anything — even for the minimal edge build below. bilbycast-mxl-rs, bilbycast-decklink-rs and bilbycast-rga-rs back the off-by-default mxl, sdi-decklink and rga-transfer features, but they are unconditional path-dependency entries in bilbycast-edge/Cargo.toml, and Cargo loads every path dependency’s manifest while resolving the graph whether or not its feature is enabled. A missing sibling directory aborts the build at manifest load, before a single crate compiles.

The manager source is proprietary (EULA-licensed) and not publicly cloneable — install the signed pre-built tarball via Install the manager instead. The manager has no feature-flag combinations that would warrant a source build.

Install build-time apt packages

sudo apt update
sudo apt install build-essential cmake make clang libclang-dev pkg-config \
                 libssl-dev g++ nasm libdrm-dev libasound2-dev libudev-dev

Don’t drop nasm: on x86 / x86_64 the vendored FFmpeg build script falls back to --disable-x86asm when nasm isn’t on PATH and the build then succeeds, emitting only a cargo:warning about the assembly-less libswscale it produced. Read the build log rather than treating a green build as a correct binary.

To match the *-full release feature set you need the dev headers for every backend video-encoders-full compiles in — x264 + x265 (software encoders), VAAPI (encode + decode), and QSV (x86_64). Most come from apt:

sudo apt update
sudo apt install libx264-dev libx265-dev libnuma-dev \
                 libva-dev libvpl-dev

One asymmetry to know about before you distribute what you build: Debian / Ubuntu’s libx264-dev ships no libx264.a, so the build script finds no static archive and links libx264 dynamically (with a cargo:warning saying so). The result is pinned to the build host’s libx264.so.<build> SONAME — x264 pastes its build number into symbol names, so a soname symlink on the target does not rescue it. For a portable binary, build x264 from source with ./configure --enable-static --enable-pic --disable-cli and put that prefix’s lib/pkgconfig first on PKG_CONFIG_PATH, which is exactly what the release workflow does. libx265-dev needs none of this — it does ship libx265.a, and libnuma-dev satisfies its -lnuma at the static link.

libva-dev is required by both video-encoder-vaapi and video-decoder-vaapi; libvpl-dev (oneVPL) covers video-encoder-qsv + video-decoder-qsv and is x86_64 only — omit it on aarch64 (Intel QuickSync is x86_64-only, and the aarch64 *-full artefact excludes QSV).

video-encoders-full also compiles in NVENC (video-encoder-nvenc) and NVDEC (video-decoder-nvdec), which need the NVIDIA codec headers. Ubuntu does not package these — they must be cloned and installed from source before the full build will compile:

git clone https://git.videolan.org/git/ffmpeg/nv-codec-headers.git
cd nv-codec-headers && sudo make install && cd ..

Without both the VAAPI headers and the NVENC/NVDEC headers in place, --features video-encoders-full fails to compile. (You don’t need an NVIDIA GPU or driver to build — the headers are enough; NVENC/NVDEC simply stay dormant at runtime on hosts without the driver.)

ARM Rockchip SBCs (RK3568 / RK3588 — NanoPi R5S/R6S, Orange Pi 5, Radxa Rock 5B) only, for the RKMPP hardware H.264 / HEVC encode + decode and the RGA DRM_PRIME→sysmem transfer (rga-transfer). Neither rockchip_mpp nor librga is in stock Ubuntu, so add the maintained Rockchip multimedia PPA first:

sudo add-apt-repository -y ppa:jjriek/rockchip-multimedia
sudo apt update
sudo apt install librockchip-mpp-dev librga-dev librga2 libdrm-dev

librga2 is not optional. This PPA’s librga-dev declares no dependency on the runtime package, so installing only the dev half leaves /usr/lib/aarch64-linux-gnu/librga.so dangling at a librga.so.2 that isn’t there — and that doesn’t fail early, it fails at the final link of the edge binary, roughly twelve minutes in, as cannot find -lrga.

The hardware is a runtime dependency only — the VPU (/dev/mpp_service) and the 2D accelerator (/dev/rga) — so these features compile on any aarch64 host, not just a Rockchip board.

Build

# Edge — matches the published x86_64-linux-full release tarball
cd bilbycast-edge && cargo build --release \
    --features "video-encoders-full display multiviewer mxl mxl-not-built sdi-decklink" && cd ..

# Or a minimal edge — protocol bridging only, no software video encoders
cd bilbycast-edge && cargo build --release && cd ..

# Edge with Rockchip RKMPP hardware encode + decode (RK3568 / RK3588 only)
# rga-transfer is the RGA DRM_PRIME->sysmem copy that fixes RK3588 display stutter —
# the feature that distinguishes the aarch64-linux-rockchip release artefact.
cd bilbycast-edge && cargo build --release \
    --features "video-encoder-rkmpp video-decoder-rkmpp rga-transfer display" && cd ..

# Relay — matches the lean *-linux release tarball (opaque forwarder only)
cd bilbycast-relay && cargo build --release && cd ..

# Or the relay with viewer distribution — matches the *-linux-distribution tarball
cd bilbycast-relay && cargo build --release \
    --features "viewer-distribution-vendored,portal" && cd ..

The release binaries land in each crate’s target/release/.

video-encoders-full is only the codec half of a *-full artefact — multiviewer, mxl and sdi-decklink are separate features, which is why the command above names them. Two of those carry build-time prerequisites of their own: mxl needs the bilbycast-mxl-rs sibling and its submodule (mxl-not-built skips the heavy libmxl C++ build and dlopens libmxl.so at runtime instead — see MXL), and sdi-decklink needs DECKLINK_SDK_DIR pointed at the EULA-gated Blackmagic SDK’s Linux/include directory or libdecklink-sys’s build script panics when it is unset (see SDI). Drop sdi-decklink from the feature list to build a full edge without SDI.

The relay’s default feature set is empty, so a bare cargo build --release is the pure opaque forwarder: no WHEP SFU, no LL-HLS / CMAF origin, no viewer portal. The distribution command additionally produces a second binary, bilbycast-portal, alongside bilbycast-relay — see Viewer distribution.

Rockchip: prefer the prebuilt binary

Each release publishes a dedicated bilbycast-edge-aarch64-linux-rockchip.tar.gz with RKMPP already compiled in (plus x264 / x265 CPU fallback for 10-bit / 4:2:2, which the VPU can’t encode). Install that instead of building unless you need a custom feature set — and the manager’s remote-upgrade path auto-selects it for nodes running the Rockchip variant. RKMPP encode needs a Rockchip BSP kernel exposing /dev/mpp_service and the running user in the video group.

Run

./bilbycast-edge/target/release/bilbycast-edge --config config.json
./bilbycast-relay/target/release/bilbycast-relay

For the manager + relay setup steps that the release tarballs guide you through (Postgres, secrets, registration tokens, systemd units), follow Install the manager and Install the relay — for the relay, substitute the path to your target/release/ binary for the tarball one.

Feature flags

The most useful Cargo feature flags on the edge:

Flag	Default	Effect
tls	on	HTTPS + RTMPS
webrtc	on	WebRTC WHIP / WHEP via str0m
fdk-aac	on	In-process AAC decode and encode
media-codecs	on	In-process video decode + thumbnail JPEG, plus Opus / MP2 / AC-3 audio encode
replay	on	Continuous flow recording to disk + clip playback as a fresh input
display	on (Linux)	Local-display output (HDMI / DisplayPort + ALSA)
video-encoder-x264	off	H.264 software transcoding via libx264 (GPL-2.0-or-later)
video-encoder-x265	off	HEVC software transcoding via libx265 (GPL-2.0-or-later)
video-encoder-nvenc	off	NVIDIA NVENC H.264 / HEVC
video-encoder-qsv	off	Intel QuickSync H.264 / HEVC (x86_64 only)
video-decoder-nvdec	off	NVIDIA NVDEC hardware decode for the local-display output (h264_cuvid / hevc_cuvid); shares nv-codec-headers with video-encoder-nvenc
video-decoder-qsv	off	Intel QSV hardware decode for the local-display output (h264_qsv / hevc_qsv); shares libvpl-dev with video-encoder-qsv; x86_64 only
video-encoder-vaapi	off	VAAPI H.264 / HEVC encode (h264_vaapi / hevc_vaapi) — AMD (Mesa radeonsi) or Intel (iHD); royalty-free. Needs libva-dev + libdrm-dev; Linux only
video-decoder-vaapi	off	VAAPI hardware decode for the local-display output; zero-copy DMA-BUF / KMS scanout. Same deps as video-encoder-vaapi; Linux only
video-encoder-rkmpp	off	Rockchip RKMPP hardware H.264 / HEVC encode (h264_rkmpp / hevc_rkmpp, 8-bit 4:2:0) on aarch64 RK3568 / RK3588. Needs librockchip-mpp-dev; not in video-encoders-full (Rockchip-only, links dynamically). Shipped prebuilt as the aarch64-linux-rockchip release artefact
video-encoders-full	off	Composite of every x86_64 / generic-aarch64 video codec backend — encoders (x264 + x265 + NVENC + QSV + VAAPI) and HW decoders (NVDEC + QSV-decode + VAAPI-decode). Used by the *-full release tarballs; runtime probe auto-detects which backends the host can actually open. Excludes RKMPP (Rockchip-only — see video-encoder-rkmpp)

Default-off encoder flags are off because they pull in extra system dependencies and (for x264 / x265) flip the binary licence to AGPL-3.0-or-later as a combined work with GPL-2.0-or-later code. The published release tarball turns them on via video-encoders-full so you don’t have to think about this — install the signed binary unless you have a reason to compile your own.