The other category of users who could potentially be interested belong obviously to the professional broadcast industry. If you are able to set up your own streaming server, maybe redirecting your streams to the main services like Twitch or YouTube and are interested in achieving low-latency with improved network resilience, read on. If you're using exclusively these services, no need to read further.Īt this stage of the adoption of SRT protocol, you'll have to be technically inclined if you want to use SRT. (Mixer though relies on WebRTC through its proprietary FTL protocol which OBS already supports). Most still use RTMP (Twitch, YouTube, Facebook.). Long answer: None of the main streaming services support the SRT protocol for ingest. The API is fully documented on GitHub.Ī very good source of info is the SRT Cookbook.Ĭan SRT be used with Twitch or my favorite service? There is also a white paper which can be found here Other competing new protocols are WebRTC, Zixi (closed source) and RIST the latter two are quite similar to SRT and all go beyond RTMP.įor further technical details, we recommend this video by Alex Converse, a Twitch engineer: SRT adds up to these two protocols to transport MPEGTS, with the best of two worlds: the reliability of TCP, and the lower latency of UDP. It can also be used with TCP, which is more reliable but has larger latency. (In terms of comparison, RTMP protocol relies on the FLV container.) The MPEGTS container is usually used along with UDP protocol, which makes it fast, but very unreliable and prone to packet loss. While RTMP development has been abandoned since 2012, SRT development is still very much active.Īs a protocol, it is content agnostic, although the industry uses it along with an MPEGTS container, which is the de facto standard in broadcast industry.
Unlike RTMP, SRT is an open source protocol, and the source code can be found on GitHub. (Hey Haivision, friendly suggestion: it'd be nice to have this vid posted on YouTube instead of having to enter personal info! :P ) The NAB 2019 NAB SRT panel can be watched here. See the NAB 2018 SRT panel with ESPN, NFL, Microsoft speakers talking about their use of SRT:
(2) low latency (as low as twice the round-trip between encoder and ingest server, with sub-second latency usually). (1) better resilience to network issues (jitter, lost packets, delay, bandwidth fluctuations) with mechanisms for packet recovery (retransmission or ARQ automatic repeat request and also FEC forward error correction) + internet bonding and