SRT Video Transport Protocol Open-Sourced

[phoronix]

Phoronix: SRT Video Transport Protocol Open-Sourced

In aiming to enhance online video streaming, the SRT video protocol has been open-sourced and an alliance forming around that for low-latency video...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=SRT-Open-Sourced

[TheBlackCat]

Anyone have any idea about patents for this? "Ctrl+F" didn't find the word in either article. Having it open-sourced doesn't mean much if you can't implement it without paying a licensing fee.

[microcode]

It'll be interesting to see what they mean by low latency. It would be nice to have something with shallower buffers than your typical DASH (which suffers from requiring a large number of transient TCP connections).

[eydee]

Cool, but the name is already taken. STR is a form of text file containing subtitles for movies. Has been for decades.

[higuita]

yes, name collisions in tech are common... it is usually not a problem as usually they refer to somewhat different techs... it still a pain

[Nille_kungen]

Cool, but the name is already taken. STR is a form of text file containing subtitles for movies. Has been for decades.

Don't you mean srt?

[shmerl]

So it's just a protocol and it's codec agnostic?

[FishB8]

So it's just a protocol and it's codec agnostic?

It's a transport protocol used with MPEG-TS in place of UDP. You don't loose packets like you do with UDP, but it offers some nice features that you do not get with plain TCP. MPEG-TS is what limits your codec options, not the transport protocol.

I've used their Makito-X appliances, and the latency for 2 way communication is lower than anything else I've seen out there. It's like your talking face to face. Except that the video is high quality fixed frame-rate video suitable for broadcast. The low latency and high quality come at the expense of a fairly high bitrate.

[(tpm)]

Anyone have any idea about patents for this? "Ctrl+F" didn't find the word in either article. Having it open-sourced doesn't mean much if you can't implement it without paying a licensing fee.

I suspect if their plan was to earn royalties from patents they wouldn't have licensed the library under the LGPL.

[FishB8]

I suspect if their plan was to earn royalties from patents they wouldn't have licensed the library under the LGPL.

Copyright law and Patent law are 2 separate things. LGPL is copyright. You can enforce patent royalties even though something is released under the LGPL copyright license. For instance, the x264 encoder is released under and open-source copyright, but if you use it you are still expected to pay patent licensing fees to the various patent holders.