// HACKER NEWS — CYBERSECURITY
Hijacking the PS5's RTMP Stream
Sony has progressively locked down what you can do with the PS5’s hardware. Streaming is a good example: the console gives you a nice, convenient “Broadcast” button, but the moment you want to do anything outside the handful of services Sony supports, it gets annoying very fast.
Third-party Bluetooth devices are the same story! Sony locks the wireless stack to their own peripherals, so your headphones or controllers from other brands simply won’t pair :/
I often stream games with friends on Discord who watch me play, but the PS5 doesn’t support screen sharing to Discord. The obvious fix is a capture card — plug the HDMI output into a capture card, feed it into OBS on your Mac, stream from there. But decent ones aren’t cheap, and I didn’t want to spend upwards of $100 just for this.
Remote Play somewhat worked for me. I could connect the PS5 to my MacBook, share the Mac’s screen to Discord and play from there.
The problem is that you need to connect everything to the Remote Play device: controller, earphones, etc. I also occasionally ran into input lag, and the stream quality is entirely controlled by the PS5. You can’t really configure anything.
I didn’t want to change my physical setup every time I wanted to stream.
The PS5 supports streaming to YouTube and Twitch by default if you’re signed into those accounts. The protocol used for this is RTMP, or Real-Time Messaging Protocol, which is commonly used for live audio/video streaming.
So when you start a broadcast, the PS5 roughly does this:
What if we could make our own device act as Twitch and receive that RTMP stream instead?
That’s the idea. The PS5 doesn’t hardcode Twitch’s IP, it looks it up via DNS every time. If we control what DNS returns, we control where the stream goes.