Architecture Overview

BroadcastStream is an event-driven microservices architecture built explicitly to deliver low-latency (glass-to-glass ~2-4s) Adaptive Bitrate (ABR) live video.

It orchestrates three decoupled core services via Docker:

1. MediaMTX

A high-performance routing proxy and ingester for WebRTC and RTMP. MediaMTX does not transcode video; instead, it relies on its native webhook hooks (runOnReady, runOnNotReady) to spin off sub-processes on demand.

2. Node.js Tracking API (Port 4000)

We stripped out bloated state mapping (e.g. Postgres or Redis keys). The API simply maintains a fast, constantly synchronized array (Map<string, StreamInfo>) populated by /webhook/on-publish HTTP calls from MediaMTX.

3. NGINX Reverse Proxy (Port 8080)

NGINX provides two critical functions: HLS Segment Delivery and Edge Tunneling. Cloudflare caching can be unpredictable, breaking the stream. By putting NGINX in front of the local var/www/hls volume, we assert aggressive headers (Cache-Control: immutable). Because NGINX runs the static UI and API /api/ subfolders, viewers and tunnels don't need multiple ports open.