Is the latency of SRT protocol really that good?

There are many kinds of protocols in the field of video transmission, and there are different mainstream protocols for different scenarios. We mostly use RTMP or RTMPS protocol does live to stream, But recently, more and more clients ask us if we can provide with SRT protocol. So what is the SRT? Why this protocol has suddenly become popular?

Let’s check the definition of SRT firstly, according to Wikipedia’s definition, SRT is an open-source video transport protocol that utilizes the UDP transport protocol. Clients like its low latency advantage.

What’s the difference between RTMP protocol and SRT protocol?

Simply to say, SRT and RTMP are similar in that they are both protocols for video streaming. RTMP is a very mature and widely used live streaming protocol based on TCP, and SRT is a transport protocol based on UDT (UDP). The difference between TCP reliability and UDP speed can be understood from the low end-to-end latency of the SRT protocol.

But some of our domestic client streaming via SRT, but they think latency is not a big difference with RTMP. The streaming via SRT protocol on Q8 to one domestic could streaming platform, and watch by Mobile. Latency is no big difference.

What’s the reason?

Because Mine Q8 streaming to the cloud platform via SRT protocol, the cloud platform will send the stream in different formats according to different terminal transcoding, if the back-end RTMP and HLS protocols remain unchanged, it will no change in latency.

What is the significance of the SRT protocol?
Point to point is SRT protocol, the delay is relatively low, that is, push flow SRT, pull flow is also SRT only. SRT point to point transmission, the delay is more stable, long-run is also not large fluctuations.