How can I stream videos directly to Google Drive?

Help and Support
1

What is the problem you are having with rclone?

I am not having a problem with rclone, yet I do have a question.

How can I stream videos directly to Google Drive?

I am running Linux Mint 21.1.

Let's say I was using OBS (Open Broadcaster Software) to record a video on my laptop. How could I have that video directly streamed to my Google Drive account?

Here's my use case: let's say I had been using OBS to record a video for 27 minutes. If something were to go awry on my end, let's say, I inadvertently quit out of OBS or OBS were to crash, I still want those 27 minutes to be stored on my Google Drive account.

2

You can not stream to Google Drive. It operates on files. When OBS finishes and file is created then it can ba transferred to the cloud e.g. Google Drive.

You can rclone mount your gdrive with --vfs-cache-mode full flag and save OBS files in mount directory. It wont be though "streamed" to gdrive only uploaded when finished.

3

Thanks for your reply.

OBS Studio 28 has Automatic File Splitting which, "Allow[s] users to choose to save recordings in split files instead of one monolithic file."

"When creators recorded their streams in the past, there was a risk of losing the entire recording should a power outage, or computer failure occur. Now, creators can automatically split their recordings by time or file size. For example, you can save your recordings in one-hour increments, so you will only lose part of your stream if a power outage occurs. This update will be useful to creators who stream for long periods of time and want to ensure those recordings are safe."

Therefore, if I were to set OBS' Automatic File Splitting to save every minute to a local directory on my laptop which I had named, for example "OBS_recordings", and if I set Rclone to upload each of those one minute file immediately after it had been saved in "OBS_recordings", then, theoretically in a best case scenario, every minute Rclone would upload a file to my Google Drive account.

However, because I asked ChatGPT, "Automatically and for free, can Google Apps Script script concatenate multiple videos on Google Drive into one video?" and ChatGPT responded, "Google Apps Script does not have built-in functionality to directly concatenate videos stored on Google Drive into a single video file." then I think I might run Rclone on a VPS (such as Hetzner Cloud for approximately 5 US dollars per month) to concatenate each one minute video into one large video. Then I would have Rclone on my VPS upload that large video to my Google Drive account.

For increased redundancy, in addition I could have Rclone on my VPS upload that large video to another server (such as Backblaze or Wasabi) so that I would have my video stored in three places...

  1. My local drive, and
  2. My Google Drive account, and
  3. Backblaze or Wasabi

Ten days after the large video had been successfully uploaded from my VPS to my Google Drive account, and either Backblaze or Wasabi, I suppose I would have the large video on my VPS pragmatically deleted (say, with a cron job) because it would be unnecessarily expensive to store my videos on my VPS.

4

Yea. Perfectly correct. Notice file splitting part.

rclone will not provide any magic streaming to cloud storage. What you can achieve locally can be only backed to cloud.

5

I am not an engineer. I only know enough about system administration, er, uh, I mean DevOps, to be dangerous. Therefore, I would appreciate it if you would guesstimate how long it might take an intermediate DevOps engineer (neither a newbie nor a guru) to set up and debug what I indicated in my penultimate message.

My guess is about 5 to 10 hours: 2 to 3 hours to set it up and then another, 3 to 7 hours to debug it over the course of a few months in response to bug reports I imagine I would need to send the DevOps engineer.

Sure, in theory a DevOps engineer could probably set up what I want in an hour. But, that's not how stuff usually works in practice. In particular, the debugging almost invariably takes much more time than it seems it should.

6

But I thought Rclone was magical! /s Seriously, I don't know how much about how Rclone actually works, but can't it be configured out of the box to run every X seconds? If not, I presume Rclone can be run with a cron job (or some other job scheduler software) every X seconds. Right?

7

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