Streaming Sundays: A DIY Solution for Grace Covenant Church
When Grace Covenant Church reached out through 850 Tech Gurus, they had a simple but important need: “We want to stream our services reliably to TVs around the building, but we don’t have a big budget for it.”
Most off-the-shelf streaming solutions can run into the thousands. But that didn’t sit right with me—especially when I knew there were more affordable ways to deliver the same end result. That’s where the Raspberry Pi 4 came in.
The Challenge
Grace Covenant needed a system that could:
- Take a live feed from their sanctuary computer running OBS Studio.
- Distribute it in real time to TVs across the campus.
- Stay as hands-off as possible for volunteers.
- Be affordable, reliable, and expandable.
The Solution
I configured a Raspberry Pi 4B (4GB) as a lightweight NGINX RTMP server. Here’s the basic flow:
- OBS Studio encodes the livestream feed.
- The Pi receives the stream through RTMP.
- The TVs connect to the Pi and play the feed using VLC.
The best part? The Pi runs headless in the background. Once it’s configured, it just works—no babysitting required.
The Hurdle
During early testing, VLC did something strange: it kept identifying the video stream as audio-only. Imagine the disappointment of seeing a black screen when you were expecting live video!
After some digging, it turned out to be a codec issue. By tweaking the encoding settings in OBS and making sure the Pi pushed out proper metadata, we got VLC to recognize the video stream correctly every time.
The Result
Now Grace Covenant has a budget-friendly streaming system that:
- Boots automatically with the Raspberry Pi.
- Distributes video around the church with almost no delay.
- Can be scaled later if they add more TVs or even want to stream online.
Most importantly, it solved a real problem without breaking the bank. The entire setup cost a fraction of what a commercial system would have, and it gave their volunteers confidence that they could focus on ministry, not troubleshooting.
Why It Matters
This project sums up what I love about 850 Tech Gurus: taking technology that seems complex or out of reach, and making it accessible for churches and organizations. Sometimes the right solution isn’t the fanciest one—it’s the one that works, fits the budget, and makes ministry easier.
Filed under: Uncategorized - @ September 17, 2025 5:47 pm