Hello,
Information on the Blogs is confusing as people will tell me that RTMP, HLS etc can do the job, but this is NOT true for browser-based Websites for Broadcast Streaming. Seems that WebRTC is the only ball game in town (as Flash will be gone this year). Comments welcome.
Hi @Phil Londrico. Per today, WebRTC is the most used, and probably most widely-supported protocol for low-latency playback from a web browser. There are other solutions, all of them proprietary by third parties, and pretty much all of them based on websockets.
When you want to play Streaming video in the browser, you’re limited to what the browser supports (plus, to an extent, what you can develop w/javascript), and per today, that means that WebRTC is probably the most common choice. Of course it has its limitations (e.g. it’s difficult to implement ABR, and - not at least - limited scalability).
There are several initiatives to get low-latency over HTTP; probably the most known and discussed is Apple’s Low-Latency HLS (LL-HLS), of which the spec was made final just now in Mar/Apr. Then there’s LHLS with CMAF, an initiative from MPEG et al. And THEOplayer has developed HESP and is working hard on pushing this in the market. However, it’ll take some time before either of these will be ready for implementation in production environments. The entire chain (at least media server, cdn, and player, and sometimes also the encoder) must be updated to support low-latency. My guess is another 6-12 months, but that’s IMHO.
AFAIK Wowza has support for Apple’s LL-HLS and LHLS CMAF, but I don’t know of any player that supports either of these per today. And the CDN must also support certain features in order to convey the stream with low delay.
Great answer and much appreciated Karel.
Karel,
Small world my friend!!! Anyway, great answer and helpful response.
David Kary