LOLS IRL questions and answers

A free IRL streaming app for Android. It captures your camera and microphone, composites scenes and chat overlays on the phone's GPU, and sends the result to Twitch, Kick, YouTube or any SRT or RTMP server you point it at.

What makes it different is network bonding. It streams over Wi-Fi and cellular at the same time, so one network dying does not end your stream. It is on Google Play, there is no account with us to create and nothing is locked behind a payment.

No. Bonding is resilience, not speed, and this is the thing people most often expect it to be. Your links are not added together into one bigger pipe: your bitrate is what your networks can actually carry, the same as it would be on one of them.

What a second link buys you is what happens next. When the first link degrades or dies, the stream carries on over the other one instead of ending, and when the dead link comes back it rejoins on its own with no input from you. Sitting still on good Wi-Fi you will notice nothing. Walking out of range, riding through a tunnel or standing in a crowd of forty thousand phones, you notice all of it.

Practical advice: set your bitrate to what a single good link can carry, and treat the second link as the reason the stream survives rather than as extra headroom.

SRT is a low delay transport that runs over UDP and recovers lost packets without the collapse TCP gives you on a bad mobile signal. SRTLA is a link aggregation layer on top of SRT, created for the BELABOX project: the sender opens one socket per network, registers them all as a group with a receiver running srtla_rec, and spreads packets across the group with its own per link window and failover.

LOLS IRL speaks that same srtla. Anything BELABOX compatible works as your receiver, whether that is one of ours or one you run yourself. None of it is proprietary to us, which is the point: you are never locked in.

For bonding, yes, because the links have to be put back together somewhere before a single stream continues on to Twitch or Kick. You get that receiver one of two ways: use a LOLS Cloud relay, which is free and already running, or self-host your own receiver, which the app treats identically.

If you are not bonding, you need nothing at all. Plain RTMP straight to your platform works with only the server and key from their dashboard.

Nothing. No account with us, no card, no subscription. You sign in with Twitch to create a key, which is how the allowance stays attached to a person rather than to a key. Each key includes 20 hours of streaming a month, which is well past ordinary IRL use and exists so the relays stay fast for everyone using them. Fair use is per person rather than per key. If you need more, ask: we would rather hear from you than have you hit a wall mid stream.

There are relays in the UK, Singapore and Australia, or self-host your own receiver if you would rather not depend on ours. The relay guide walks through getting a key and where it goes, and the relay page lists the hosts and ports.

Any phone on Android 12 or newer. After that it comes down to what your phone's hardware encoder can do, which varies far more than the spec sheet suggests, so the app probes your device and shows you what it found rather than offering a list that fails at go live.

H.264 and HEVC, up to 4K and up to 60 fps where the hardware supports it. If yours tops out lower, the app says so and clamps to what will actually encode.

Yes. Twitch, Kick, YouTube and anything else that accepts RTMP or RTMPS: paste the server and key from their dashboard and go. SRT and SRTLA destinations are set up the same way, and you can send to several destinations at once from a single encode, with a local MP4 recording running alongside.

Chat overlays are built in for Twitch and Kick, and reading chat needs no login at all. On Twitch the overlay renders 7TV, BTTV and FFZ emotes and real badge icons, so chat on your stream looks like chat on the site.

The remaining links carry the stream and you stay live. In the stats overlay the dead link's row turns red while the others keep sending, and when that network comes back it re-registers and rejoins the group by itself.

It is worth proving to yourself before you need it. Go live on bonding, turn Wi-Fi off for a minute and watch the stats. The bonding guide covers what each indicator means while that is happening.

Yes. Local MP4 recording runs at the same time as the stream and comes off the same encode, so it costs almost nothing extra in heat or battery. It follows the stream's adaptive quality: it is a clean local copy of what you sent, not a separate higher quality master.

There is no account with us, no advertising, no analytics and no tracking SDK in the app. Your settings, scenes, destinations and stream keys live on your device.

Chat overlays read public chat with no login. Signing in to a platform, so you can send messages from the app rather than only read them, is optional and is your own account with that platform. The privacy policy is one page and says exactly what talks to what.

The app is free. No subscription, no watermark, no feature gates, no trial that expires. If you want to help pay for the servers and the development there is a Ko-fi, and donations never buy features that other people do not get.

Yes, and it is a first class path rather than an afterthought. Add an SRT destination with your host, port and stream id, or an SRTLA destination pointed at your own srtla_rec, and it behaves exactly as our relays do. SRT supports AES-128, AES-192 and AES-256, and a passphrase from an existing setup comes across when you import it. Default SRT latency is 2000 ms, and the app shows the round trip it is measuring so you can match the two.

The self-hosting guide covers what to run and which ports matter.

Export the settings link from the other app, the one starting with larix://. Then in LOLS IRL open Settings, tap Import from IRL Pro and paste it. Your encoder settings and your SRT and RTMP destinations come across, SRT stream ids and passphrases included, and imported destinations arrive switched off so you can check them before going live.

There is a full walkthrough on coming from IRL Pro, including what to expect from each setting.

Often. Releases go out through Google Play, and what is new in each one is on the listing. Most of what ships comes from people streaming with it and telling us what got in the way, which is what the Discord is for.