I've heard numerous times from folks that Owncast can't handle streaming and it's impossible. Well, it works. You don't need a million dollars to stream to your own server. The server transcodes...

This was my very unscientific attempt at opening many streams to my Owncast to see if it could support many open streams.

I could. I have 3 qualities, LOW, MED, HIGH (which is a passthrough). Owncast only has to transcode each of these qualities once. Then the only issue you contend with is bandwitdh.

My $8/month VPS from Hetzner was fine on all fronts.

As for bandwidth, Owncast supports S3 buckets and CDNs if someone can go through 20TB/month that Hetzner gives.

I have figured out I can use ffmpeg to open streams and throw them to /dev/null so gonna try that next! Stay tuned!