BlobTube

BlobTube is a low-bandwidth video streaming service written in Go, because sometimes you don’t need 4K ultra-HD cinematic pores — you just need the video to load.

Built for constrained networks, hobby servers, edge deployments, and people who still remember buffering circles as a personality trait.

🚀 What Is BlobTube?

BlobTube is a lightweight, efficient video streaming platform designed to:

• 📦 Serve video as simple binary blobs (hence, Blob)
• 🧵 Keep memory usage tight and predictable
• 🌐 Perform reliably on low-bandwidth or high-latency networks
• ⚡ Leverage Go’s concurrency model for clean, scalable streaming
• 🛠 Stay minimal, hackable, and delightfully unbloated

If traditional streaming platforms are luxury cruise ships, BlobTube is a stubborn little tugboat that always reaches the harbor.

🧠 Philosophy

• Keep it simple.
• Make it fast.
• Avoid unnecessary abstractions.
• No enterprise buzzword soup.
• If it compiles and streams, ship it.

🏗 Why Go?

Because:

• Goroutines are cheap.
• The standard library actually works.
• Cross-compilation is painless.
• You enjoy feeling morally superior about memory usage.

🧪 Status

BlobTube is under active development.
Which means:

• Things may break.
• APIs may change.
• You will probably refactor something at 2am.

Development

This repo uses a Nix dev shell to provide toolchain dependencies.

# Enter the dev environment (provides go + golangci-lint)
nix develop

Common commands:

make build
make test
make lint

The build output is bin/blobtube.

Docker

Run locally with Docker Compose (generates a self-signed cert on first run):

docker compose up --build

Then open https://localhost:8443/health.

📡 The Vision

A streaming service that:

• Works on weak connections
• Runs on tiny servers
• Doesn’t melt CPUs
• Doesn’t need 47 microservices and a Kubernetes cluster named after a Greek god

Errata

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Stay tuned.
Or don’t. It’ll buffer eventually.