HOW DISCORD'S LIVE STREAMING WORKS

Summary from the TLDR Web Dev newsletter

Discord's live streaming feature broadcasts users' screen activity to others in their group. To achieve this, Discord uses OS-specific APIs for screen and audio capture along with robust fallback mechanisms. The captured video data is then encoded using codecs like VP8 and H264 for efficient transmission, with Discord servers handling quality adjustments and routing for high-quality delivery to viewers.