Sony's PS5 gives you a broadcast button and then tells you exactly where you're allowed to use it: Twitch or YouTube. If you want to stream to Discord — which is where most casual game-watching actually happens — you're out of luck. The official answer is a $100+ capture card. This hack sidesteps that entirely with DNS manipulation and an nginx RTMP server running on a Mac. The mechanism is elegant in its simplicity. The PS5 doesn't hardcode Twitch's IP address; it resolves it via DNS every time you hit broadcast. If you control what DNS returns, you control where the stream goes. The author runs dnsmasq on their Mac, configured to resolve Twitch's ingest domains to the Mac's local IP. The PS5 connects, thinks it's talking to Twitch, and pushes its H.264/AAC stream right into a local nginx-rtmp instance. Getting there wasn't straightforward. The first attempt — spoofing ingest.twitch.tv — failed because that endpoint is just a discovery layer that redirects to regional servers over RTMPS with certificate validation. No way to install custom CAs on a PS5. YouTube's plain RTMP worked initially but the PS5 polls YouTube's API to confirm the stream is live, killing the broadcast after 60 seconds when YouTube never receives anything. The breakthrough came from DNS logs. The PS5 resolves ingest.global-contribute.live-video.net, which chains down to the actual RTMP server. Spoofing the contribute.live-video.net wildcard covers all subdomains and hits the plain RTMP path — no TLS, no certificate problems. The stream flows. The network plumbing is tidy. A GL.iNet router running OpenWRT assigns the Mac's IP as the DNS server specifically for the PS5's DHCP lease using a tagged option, so no manual console configuration is needed. The nginx-rtmp server fires an onpublish callback to a menu bar app when the stream starts, surfacing the RTMP URL for easy copying. The final result: mpv pulls the stream with a low-latency profile, sub-second delay, and the author shares that window to Discord. No capture card, no Remote Play input lag, no tethered controller setup. The PS5 outputs 1080p60 H.264 with AAC stereo, and the author reports weeks of reliable use. This is the kind of project that makes you appreciate how much of modern console lockdown is enforced by soft barriers — DNS resolution, API health checks, TLS pinning — rather than fundamental architectural constraints. The PS5's streaming capability is perfectly good; Sony just doesn't want you pointing it anywhere they haven't approved. The complete source code, including the macOS menu bar app, is published openly.
