Wowza Community

Live streaming to iOS devices, without delay

Hello,

I am looking for the best software solution that would allow me to stream live video feed to iOS devices with minimal delay.

Would you be able to tell me if this is possible with Wowza and what delay I can expect?

Right now I have 30 sec.

Thanks

Hi Tom,

Apple HLS uses HTTP streaming which, unlike other video streaming protocols, inherently incurs more latency. That being the case, Wowza does offer extensive capability to tune HLS packetization, which can dramatically improve performance. Take a look at this resource:

How to configure Apple HTTP Live Streaming packetization (cupertinostreaming)

I would suggest setting up a test by requesting a trial license and free download of Wowza Streaming Engine.

-Tim

Thank You Tim.

I will take a look at suggested URL, and make a test.

Do you think that I will be able to reduce latency to less than 5 second?

Someone suggested to me that they have 30ms latency, which seams even to be difficult to measure…

Thanks, T

Hi,

HTTP streaming is chunk based which means that the player requests chunks of the stream each time. The server doesn’t automatically push chunks out to the player. These chunks are sized on key frame boundaries so each chunk must start with a key frame and include all the other frames up to the next key frame. A chunk normally will contain more than one key frame which is done to reduce the number of requests from the player to the server.

You can reduce the latency of the stream by reducing the key frame interval and reducing the chunk size but the lowest you will be able to go is the key frame interval.

Note: when you do reduce the latency, you will increase the load on the server per player and the player may also have problems if it cannot request the chunks quickly enough.

In contrast, RTMP and RTSP streaming are push based where the server pushes the stream out to the player at a fixed rate. It is possible to get extremely low latencies with these methods that are not possible with HTTP streaming.

Roger.