Open Live — Setup Guide

Open Live System Architecture

This guide covers the different ways to run Open Live and Open Live Studio, and how to connect them to a Strom media pipeline instance.

Open Live and Open Live Studio on OSC

Deploy the full stack on Open Source Cloud (OSC).

1. CouchDB

Open Live uses CouchDB as its document store.

  1. In the OSC dashboard, go to Services and search for CouchDB. Click Create CouchDB, then Advanced.
  2. Choose a name and password and create the instance. Note the password — you will need it later.

Important: Use only alphanumeric characters in your password. Special characters like @, :, /, or # will break the database connection URL.

CouchDB create instance
  1. Once the instance is running, click Open Application and sign in with username admin and the password you set above.
CouchDB sign in
  1. Click Create Database in the top right and name it open-live.
CouchDB create database
  1. Back in OSC, copy the URL of your CouchDB instance and construct the connection string — you will use this in the next step:
https://admin:<password>@<your-couchdb-host>/open-live

Where <your-couchdb-host> is the hostname from OSC without the https:// prefix.

CouchDB connection URL

2. Open Live

  1. In the OSC dashboard, go to Services and search for Open Live. Click Create open-live.
  2. Fill in the following fields:
Field Value
Name A name for your instance
DatabaseUrl The connection string from step 1
StromUrl Your Strom URL — see Strom setup below
StromAccessToken Your Strom access token — see Strom setup below
CorsOrigin *
Open Live environment variables
  1. Click Create and wait for the service to start. Copy the generated service URL — you will need it in the next step.

3. Open Live Studio

  1. In the OSC dashboard, go to Services and search for Open Live Studio. Click Create open-live-studio.
  2. Fill in the following fields:
Field Value
Name A name for this studio instance
OpenLiveUrl Your Open Live service URL from the previous step
OscAccessToken Your OSC Personal Access Token — store this in an OSC secret and reference it as {{secrets.oscaccesstoken}}
Open Live Studio environment variables
  1. Click Create and wait for the service to start. Click on the instance card to open the production controller in your browser.

Open Live and Open Live Studio Locally

Run Open Live and Open Live Studio on your own machine.

  1. Clone the repositories:
  2. Open Live: https://github.com/Eyevinn/open-live

  3. Open Live Studio: https://github.com/Eyevinn/open-live-studio

  4. Set up the Open Live backend environment:

cd open-live
cp .env.example .env

Edit .env:

PORT=8080
COUCHDB_URL=https://admin:<password>@<your-couchdb-host>
COUCHDB_NAME=open-live
STROM_URL=<your-strom-url>
STROM_TOKEN=<your-strom-access-token>
LOG_LEVEL=info
  1. Set up the Open Live Studio environment:
cd open-live-studio
cp .env.example .env

Edit .env:

OPEN_LIVE_URL=http://localhost:8080
  1. Start both services:
# Terminal 1 — backend
cd open-live && npm i && npm run dev

# Terminal 2 — frontend
cd open-live-studio && npm i && npm run dev

Open http://localhost:5173.

Strom

Open Live connects to a Strom media pipeline instance for video mixing and audio routing. You can use the shared Eyevinn instance or run your own.

Shared Instance

A shared Strom instance is available for development and testing. Contact us to request access — we will provide you with the URL and access token.

Locally

Run Strom on your own infrastructure. See the Strom Local Setup Guide for a full walkthrough covering Docker, GPU setup, authentication, and networking.

Companion Module

The Open Live Companion module lets you control productions from a Stream Deck or any other Bitfocus Companion surface.

See the dedicated setup guide: Open Live Companion Module Setup