Very long latency

[Jan_Klier]

I work in video post production. As many of us, I’m now looking at ways to stream my production monitor to a client who watches on a iPad or laptop. Ideally we would keep latency to 1-2s max. However, in my initial test with Wowza, I’m seeing latency of 22s. I’m hoping I’m doing something wrong and there is an easy answer.

Setup is client monitor SDI connection into BMD MiniMonitor as input to OBS. OBS streams via SRT to Wowza Cloud. Form there I have tried both the hosted page and just the HLS URL in an HMTL5 video tag.

In all cases the streams work as expected. But between me doing an event on my color app that changes the screen, and that same change appearing in the player I can count 22s.

I’m on a Gigabit broadband connection, so network latency should not be an issue. I’ve done direct SRT streams from another city with maybe 2-3s latency.

[Karel_Boek]

Supposedly you’re using HLS or MPEG-DASH for playback; and the latency it’s not because of Wowza, but because of the protocol. You can read more about that in this article: https://www.wowza.com/blog/hls-latency-sucks-but-heres-how-to-fix-it

If you’re aiming at 1-2 seconds of latency, then you should look into the WebRTC protocol and Wowza Streaming Engine. The advantage of WebRTC is it’s (ultra-) low-latency, but the downside is that it doesn’t scale as well as HLS or MPEG-DASH.

Until recently, Wowza offered Ultra-Low-Latency (ULL) in their Cloud service, but they’ve discontinued that as of Apr. 2nd. If you want to do cloud-based low-latency then there are other providers, PM me for more info.

[Jan_Klier]

Thank for the answer. I have come to a similar conclusion based on further research.

For our use case, we do need low latency, we don’t need scale (<10 viewers), and it needs to be easy to use and reasonably priced. And SRT upstream, WebRTC transcode, and easy to embed and share with audience without compromising color management.

A lot of the parts exist, but no easy bundles. Streambox is purpose built, but very expensive and not as user friendly. So I was hoping to put something better together. But Wowza doesn’t seem to be it at the moment.

[Karel_Boek]

@Jan Klier, feel free to mail karel.boek@raskenlund.com if you want to discuss this further.