Jitsi Live Streaming to YouTube with the Jitsi Meet Admin Panel (JMAP)

A town hall with 40 people is a meeting. A town hall with 2,000 people is a broadcast, and trying to run it as a meeting is how you end up with frozen video and people who can't unmute.

Jitsi live streaming is the fix: a handful of speakers stay in the Jitsi meeting, and everyone else watches on YouTube. This guide explains how that works under the hood and how to run it from the Jitsi Meet Admin Panel (JMAP), which added live streaming in version 2.

Why large Jitsi meetings need streaming

In a normal Jitsi call, every person is a full participant. Their browser sends video to the Jitsi Videobridge and receives everyone else's back. Push that into the hundreds and you start to see:

• Lag and dropped video as the bridge and people's browsers fall behind.
• Camera and microphone problems for people joining late.
• A meeting nobody can moderate , which is fatal for a webinar or an all-hands.

You can add bridges, and we've written up scaling Jitsi videobridges with Octo for when people genuinely need to talk. But if most of the audience only needs to watch, streaming is cheaper and far more reliable.

How Jitsi live streaming works

Jitsi streams through Jibri, the same component that handles recording. When a stream starts, Jibri joins the meeting as a hidden participant, renders it in a headless Chrome, and pushes the picture and sound over RTMP to YouTube using your stream key. Viewers watch on YouTube with its normal few seconds of delay, and they never touch your Jitsi server.

Two things follow from that. A Jibri instance handles one stream or recording at a time, so two simultaneous streams need two Jibris. And because the stream comes from the server, a speaker's Wi-Fi dropping doesn't end it. Our explainer on how Jibri recording works goes deeper, and the Jibri setup guide for Ubuntu covers installing it.

Jitsi Meet live streaming to YouTube with JMAP, step by step

Stock Jitsi asks a moderator to paste a stream key every time. In JMAP you connect YouTube once and schedule streams like meetings:

1. Sign in as Admin: Log in to JMAP with your administrator credentials.
2. Open the Live Streaming Tab: Navigate to the "Live Streaming" tab from the main dashboard. This is your control center for creating and managing streams.
3. Enable YouTube Connectivity: Click the "YouTube Connectivity" button and follow the prompts to authorize JMAP to stream to your YouTube account.
4. Create a New Stream: Click the "New" button to open the streaming setup window.
5. Add Stream Details: Enter a title for your stream and schedule the start time.
6. Add Participants: Select the users or groups who will actively participate in the meeting with camera and microphone access.
7. Add Viewers: Choose the groups of people who will watch the stream on YouTube. They will not join the Jitsi meeting directly.
8. Schedule the Stream: Once all details are filled in, click "Create".
9. Launch the Meeting: When it's time to start, click the "Launch" button to begin the live meeting for participants.
10. Start the Live Broadcast: As the admin in the meeting, click the streaming icon in the toolbar to begin the public broadcast to YouTube.

Give the speakers ten minutes in the meeting before you hit the streaming icon. Sound checks are much less embarrassing when YouTube isn't watching yet.

Managing your live streams

JMAP lists every stream, upcoming, ongoing and past, in one place.

Viewing and searching streams

• Upcoming Streams: See all your scheduled streams and make edits if needed.
• Ongoing Streams: Quickly join a stream that is currently active.
• Recent Streams: Review streams that have already ended.
• Search: Use the search bar to find a specific stream by its title or time.

Updating a scheduled stream

1. Go to the "Upcoming Streaming" tab.
2. Click on the stream you wish to edit.
3. In the pop-up window, modify the title, participants, or viewers.
4. Click "Save" to apply the changes.

Deleting a stream

1. Navigate to the "Upcoming Streaming" tab.
2. Find the stream you want to remove.
3. Click the delete icon on the stream's card and confirm your choice.

Connecting Jitsi Meet to YouTube

You can switch the YouTube connection on or off at any time:

• To enable: Toggle the "YouTube Connectivity" button on, sign in with your Google account, and grant the necessary permissions.
• To disable: Toggle the button off and confirm the disconnection.

The YouTube channel needs live streaming turned on before any of this works. YouTube's live streaming help page explains the requirements, and a new channel can take up to 24 hours to be enabled, so don't leave it to the morning of the event.

Moderating the stream

1. Join the stream as a moderator.
2. To end the broadcast, click the "Stop Streaming" icon in the meeting toolbar. This stops the feed to YouTube, but the internal meeting can continue.

Viewers who want to ask questions use YouTube's live chat. Keep it open in a second window for whoever is moderating, since the speakers in Jitsi won't see it otherwise.

JMAP does more than streaming: users, scheduling, branding and reports. The short version is in why a Jitsi server needs an admin panel, and the Jitsi Meet Admin Panel page has the details.