I contribute to OSS very often, mostly sponsored by the company I work for (we're in video streaming, and we're too small to build everything from scratch). Outside of company hours, I work on my personal streaming project [1], and I've had a couple of people find the "Buy me a coffee" button and GitHub sponsors page. While it is not a sustainable amount of sponsorship, the joy of seeing people support with a few bucks feels incredible. It's a passion project after all.
I used to maintain a private fork of an OSS project as I assumed my company wouldn't want specific features out there (especially since they gave a competitive advantage). I eventually met up with the maintainers of that project with a situation I couldn't figure out and they were so eager to help. After, I went to legal and told them it didn't feel fair to have OSS maintainers help out but keep it private, and to my surprise, they agreed. All I had to do was ask, and not assume.
Hey, thank you! You're not the first to mention the docs. I'll have a full rewrite of the docs planned shortly where I'll address your (& others) valid points.
I didn't know membrane until now. We do some things similarly (like transcode), although I'd like to provide the full chain, from source to playback with real-time video manipulation (such as ad, bumper insertion, filtering, ...) The latter is unique to do that open sourced.
Author here, this is a fun surprise to wake up to! I was doubting whether my project was "ready to post on HN" but someone beat me to it.
With Superstreamer, I'd like to create building blocks that simplify video end-to-end. While I initially wrote it as an "all-in-one" toolkit, I'm more leaning towards an open architecture. Like, you could use Stitcher to insert HLS interstitials (like ads, or bumpers) but have your original playlists come from Mux, Cloudflare Stream, etc... The transcode and package infrastructure is there for you to use it if you'd like to stick to a fully self hostable solution.
As for player, it's a neat facade around HLS.js (kudos to the maintainers, their project is great), while initially a streaming library, the facade exposes an interface that makes sense for UI developers.
I used to maintain a private fork of an OSS project as I assumed my company wouldn't want specific features out there (especially since they gave a competitive advantage). I eventually met up with the maintainers of that project with a situation I couldn't figure out and they were so eager to help. After, I went to legal and told them it didn't feel fair to have OSS maintainers help out but keep it private, and to my surprise, they agreed. All I had to do was ask, and not assume.
[1] https://superstreamer.xyz/