[SOLVED] How to port in SRT to OBS over the internet (not LAN) ?

[SirChuckStuart]

Buddy and I are trying to stream two video inputs from our respective computers in different cities to one Twitch channel – via one of our OBSes. Our limited hardware rules out using a screen capture to restream. We’re both living in Mainland China where Twitch is censored, naturally we use a Astrill VPN. We’ve followed this tutorial
very closely and are having no luck connecting. We’re always getting the same error code from OBS:
"An unspecified error occurred while recording. Couldn’t open ‘srt://xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx😛ort?latency=200000’ , I/O error"

:

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eDgZ-IqvCJc

We’re at a total loss here.

We’ve tried changing the UDP ports multiple times, but https://canyouseeme.org/, netstat and telnet all say our ports are perpetually closed.
We’ve tried all I.P addresses: router public IP with VPN on, with VPN off, VPN given public IP with VPN on and VPN off. ALL the IPs listed in ipconfig.
We’ve tried excluding OBS from the VPN connection.
We’ve also gotten some forwarded ports from our VPN provider and we get the same error.

Same Error every single time.

We’ve run out of leads to follow and there seems to be no more online resources for us to scour.
Inb4 don’t use VPN, just use a screen cap. Inb4 setup an rtmp server – we are poor.

 

[Murissokah]

I'm not familiar with OBS, but since you are testing for open ports I assume you need to serve something from your local computers. For this to work via VPN your VPN provider would need to NAT incoming connections to your private addresses (never seen one that does). It will also not work without the VPN if your ISP blocks traffic from whatever service needs to access your local servers (Twitch?)

So here's some ideas of what you guys can do:

1. Make sure its working locally. Run the service bound to a local address and make sure you can access it from the local network with telnet. This is to eliminate the possibility that the service is not actually listening or some firewall rule / security software might be interfering.

2. If you can get the VPN provider to nat incoming connections (port forward). Make sure the port forward is working. One way to do that is run a simple software like "port listener" to make sure there's something listening on that port and try to access the external address from the internet. If it's setup correctly, accessing the external IP assigned by your VPN provider for the NAT in the specified port should hit your port listener. Then you know the NAT is properly configured. Make sure to test on the proper protocol (UDP/TCP). Once that's working, it's a matter of configuring the OBS (can't be of much help there, but the network should not be a problem). Keep in mind that in this scenario you will not use your ISP public address for anything related to the OBS/Twitch.

3. If you cannot get a port forward to work with your VPN provider, you would need to serve from outside your ISP block zone. You mentioned you can't afford a server, but even something like a free tier AWS t2.micro machine should be able to proxy connections and run an openvpn server. Be mindful that pretty much any cloud provider charges for outbound traffic. Digitalocean is one of the cheapest ones in that regard, as it gives you a very good quota for each droplet.

I'm sorry to suggest running a server, but unless you can get a provider (VPN/ISP) to accept incoming connections and forward them to you, I don't think it will be possible to do what you guys want to without using resources outside the block zone.