Video: Pros and Cons of RTSP for Live Streaming Playback

Learn more about emerging codecs at Streaming Media's next event.

Watch Robert Reinhardt's complete presentation from Streaming Media East 2019, T102. How to Identify Real-World Playback Options, in the Streaming Media Conference Video Portal.

Read the complete transcript of this clip:

Robert Reinhardt: When I start talking about these protocols, I'm now talking about protocols that we can use internally within mobile app development. I have an Android and iOS dev on my team that I have currently active on a project. And we had to do a lot of low-level video frame manipulation for a project we're working on.

We just migrated the server stack over to Red5 Pro, who is here. I'm glad to see Chris has brought his whole gang here to talk about Red5 Pro. I think they're going to be an innovative leader in this space when it comes to WebRTC and RTSP. I mention that because in their mobile SDK, they're using RTSP in their mobile SDK.

They're not the only one. A lot of global SDKs are using RTSP for transmission. And again, this isn't something that you need in the browser, when you're talking about mobile apps--Android and other applications, or other, if you're on Android and you click an RTSP link on a webpage, it will launch a native player, usually on that Android device that's outside of the browser.

So there are different ways to plate RTSP. But when it comes to my mentioning of it here, it's more to talk about it for both a source point, like a lot of security cameras still use RTSP. I do a lot of configuration for municipal governments that have security cameras everywhere. Not security cameras, traffic cams, park cams. Maybe there are security cams, I don't know, but they're supposed to be there for the public to see like what traffic conditions are like. Those are like access cameras. Those are all RTSP transmissions into an ingest like Wowza or Red5.

Again, RTSP has TCP and UDP options. And of course, for the lowest latency, we're looking for that UDP option, right? So that we have fire and forget and not retries like you would with TCP. And again, the drawbacks. There's no native browser support really for RTSP. Firewall and port access, that's also something that I didn't mention back with WebRTC.

As we start to get into UDP layers and port allocations, if you thought Flash and RTMP and port 1935 was a nightmare, welcome to a whole new world of port allocation and firewalls with WebTC. We have come a long way with corporate IT divisions and getting firewalls updated, but it remains to be seen how we will address port access issues too. And again, it's difficult to scale something like RTSP. You can't use a HTTP address for that.