How to stream OBS to your own RTMP server on a VPS

Streaming through Twitch or YouTube works until you need control: lower latency, video retention on your own terms, simultaneous rebroadcast to multiple destinations, or simply independence from a platform that could ban your channel. Running your own RTMP server on a VPS solves all of that for a fraction of what a dedicated commercial streaming plan costs.

This tutorial covers the full path: deploying Nginx with the RTMP module on an Ubuntu VPS, configuring OBS Studio to publish to it, validating the broadcast in an external player and hardening the server for production. The persona here is the technical streamer who already knows OBS but has never administered a media server.

Estimated execution time: 40 to 60 minutes, including package downloads and the first transmission test.

Prerequisites

Before starting, confirm the environment. RTMP is a protocol sensitive to network latency — a VPS with low upload or a congested link will degrade the quality of the live stream regardless of server configuration.

Installing Nginx with the RTMP module

The nginx-rtmp-module is not shipped in the official Ubuntu repositories as a loadable dynamic module. The cleanest way on current distributions is to install the libnginx-mod-rtmp package, which already delivers the module compiled against the apt version of Nginx — no need to build from scratch.

sudo apt update
sudo apt install -y nginx libnginx-mod-rtmp

nginx -V 2>&1 | grep -o rtmp

rtmp {
    server {
        listen 1935;
        chunk_size 4096;
        allow publish 127.0.0.1;
        allow publish YOUR_HOME_IP;
        deny publish all;
        allow play all;

        application live {
            live on;
            record off;
        }
    }
}

sudo nginx -t
sudo systemctl reload nginx

Opening the firewall

By default the VPS comes with the firewall active or blocking non-standard ports. RTMP uses TCP 1935 — without an explicit rule, OBS will hit a silent timeout.

sudo ufw allow 1935/tcp
sudo ufw reload

sudo iptables -A INPUT -p tcp --dport 1935 -j ACCEPT

Configuring OBS Studio

With the server ready, OBS now has to point to it. The endpoint follows the pattern rtmp://SERVER_IP/application and the stream key is the name of the stream the player will consume.

Verifying the broadcast

Now confirm the stream is actually reaching the server and can be consumed. VLC is the fastest way — it speaks RTMP natively without any plugin.

sudo tail -f /var/log/nginx/error.log

rtmp://YOUR_SERVER_IP/live/mychannel

hls on;
hls_path /var/www/hls;
hls_fragment 2s;
hls_playlist_length 10s;

Troubleshooting

OBS connects but disconnects after a few seconds

Almost always a lack of upload bandwidth at home or on the server. Reduce the OBS bitrate to 2500 kbps and try again. If it stabilizes, bandwidth was the bottleneck — measure your real sustained upload with speedtest-cli on your machine and size the bitrate to stay below 70% of the available upload.

Error “RTMP_ReadPacket, failed to read RTMP packet header”

Typical symptom of a timeout between the RTMP client (VLC, player) and the server. Increase the timeouts in the Nginx rtmp block:

rtmp {
    server {
        listen 1935;
        chunk_size 4096;
        timeout 30s;
        ping 30s;
        ping_timeout 10s;
        # ... rest
    }
}

Reload with sudo systemctl reload nginx.

Very high latency in VLC (more than 10 seconds)

VLC has an aggressive network buffer by default. In Tools → Preferences → Input/Codecs, reduce “Network caching” to 500 ms. Raw RTMP delivers sub-3s latency — if it is still higher than that, the problem is the player, not the server.

Next steps

With the RTMP server working, it is worth considering:

• Add HLS for browsers: the hls on block in nginx-rtmp exposes the stream as .ts segments consumable by hls.js — required for an HTML5 player on your site.
• Set up automatic recording: the record all directive saves each live stream as FLV in /var/recordings, useful for retention and on-demand replay.
• Rebroadcast to Twitch/YouTube in parallel: the push rtmp://... directive inside the application forwards the stream to other destinations at no extra OBS upload cost.
• Harden with RTMPS through stunnel: to expose publishing publicly without plain text, stunnel in front of nginx-rtmp terminates TLS on port 1936.
• Move to a streaming-dedicated VPS: if you go past 50 concurrent viewers or want to deliver 4K, the CPU becomes a bottleneck on transcoding. A Hostini VPS with dedicated vCPU and a 1 Gbps symmetric link holds a lot more load than a shared server.