When it comes to streaming live video over IP, RTMP (Real-Time Messaging Protocol) has been established as a popular transport protocol – but could lower latency be achieved? Haivision has pioneered an alternative called SRT (Secure Reliable Transport), an open source protocol that gets put to the test in this new white paper.
SRT was developed by Haivision and demonstrated for the first time in 2013, stemming from the need to reduce the high cost of contribution by satellite and private networks. The company released the protocol to the open source community as a means of securely and reliably transporting low-latency video across unpredictable networks such as the public internet.
Thousands of organisations globally have since embraced SRT as a means of delivering the best-quality live video over the worst networks, solving the issues of jitter, fluctuating bandwidth and packet loss through advanced low-latency retransmission techniques.
The SRT protocol also provides end-to-end security with AES 128/256 bit encryption, video and audio stream timing recovery, simplified firewall traversal and network health monitoring between endpoints.
Aiming to clarify the differences in performance between RTMP and SRT, Haivision tested the impact of using the two protocols, by assessing both the end-to-end latency and the maximum bandwidth for long-distance streams.
RTMP vs. SRT: Comparing Latency and Maximum Bandwidth records the performances of both transport protocols over public internet, observing the latency, buffering and bandwidth, and how far a video stream can travel across the globe before it fails.
As detailed in the white paper, SRT proved to be up to 12 times faster than RTMP, experiencing no issues streaming up to 20 Mbps to any of the global locations tested, where RTMP failed at long distances at bitrates above 2 Mbps.
The white paper outlines the differences between the protocols and their performance when tested in real-world conditions, confirming SRT as the most reliable protocol for streaming low-latency live video over the internet.
Download the RTMP vs. SRT: Comparing Latency and Maximum Bandwidth white paper.
Find out more about SRT here.
