Looking to share your day, event, or the observations of your nature box live on the internet via a Raspberry Pi? Then look no further, for Alex Ellis has all you need to get started with YouTube live-streaming from your Pi.

If you spend any time on social media, be it Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, or Twitter, chances are you’ve been notified of someone ‘going live’.

Live-streaming video on social platforms has become almost ubiquitous, whether it’s content by brands, celebrities, or your cousin or nan – everyone is doing it.

Even us!

Live from Pi Towers – Welcome Carrie Anne and Alex offer up a quick tour of the Pi Towers lobby while trying to figure out how Facebook Live video works.

YouTube live-streaming with Alex Ellis and Docker

In his tutorial, Alex demonstrates an easy, straightforward approach to live-streaming via a Raspberry Pi with the help of a Docker image of FFmpeg he has built. He says that with the image, instead of “having to go through lots of manual steps, we can type in a handful of commands and get started immediately.”

Why is the Docker image so helpful?

As Alex explains on his blog, if you want to manually configure your Raspberry Pi Zero for YouTube live-streaming, you need to dedicate more than a few hours of your day.

Normally this would have involved typing in many manual CLI commands and waiting up to 9 hours for some video encoding software ( ffmpeg ) to compile itself.

Get anything wrong (like Alex did the first time) and you have to face another nine hours of compilation time before you’re ready to start streaming – not ideal if your project is time-sensitive.

Alex Ellis on Twitter See you in 8-12 hours? Building ffmpeg on a my @Raspberry_Pi #pizero with @docker

Using the Docker image

In his tutorial, Alex uses a Raspberry Pi Zero and advises that the project will work with either Raspbian Jessie Lite or PIXEL. Once you’ve installed Docker, you can pull the FFmpeg image he has created directly to your Pi from the Docker Hub. (We advise that while doing so, you should feel grateful to Alex for making the image available and saving you so much time.)

It goes without saying that you’ll need a YouTube account in order to live-stream to YouTube; go to the YouTube live streaming dashboard to obtain a streaming key.

Alex Ellis on Twitter Get live streaming to @YouTube with this new weekend project and guide using your @Raspberry_Pi and @docker. https://t.co/soqZ9D9jbS

For a comprehensive breakdown of how to stream to YouTube via a Raspberry Pi, head to Alex’s blog. You’ll also find plenty of other Raspberry Pi projects there to try out.

Why live-stream from a Raspberry Pi?

We see more and more of our community members build Raspberry Pi projects that involve video capture. The minute dimensions of the Raspberry Pi Zero and Zero W make them ideal for fitting into robots, nature boxes, dash cams, and more. What better way to get people excited about your video than to share it with them live?

If you have used a Raspberry Pi to capture or stream footage, make sure to link to your project in the comments below. And if you give Alex’s Docker image a go, do let us know how you get on.