Broadcasting RTMP from the browser

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Long gone are the days when you could whip up an RTMP broadcast in (sort of) any browser with a few lines of code, not that we honestly really miss those times. Ironically, it’s been more than 10 years since the F word became taboo, and a quick search revealed that Flash (there I said it) will finally start resting in peace at the end of the year. 

Despite, the protocol that’s been built for it – RTMP – lives on and there is no end to it in sight. Actually it’s by all means the de facto ingest standard to all streaming platforms, big and small. And implemented by many hundreds of broadcast products. Because it’s unsophisticated, it works more often than it fails, it’s open (though it hasn’t been from the beginning), offers a relatively low latency, and supports a couple of the most common codecs.

It’s not all good. As it runs on top of TCP, it can’t feasibly be tuned to operate at a fixed/predictable latency, plus it degrades ungracefully under fluctuating, unstable, or otherwise poor connections. And worst of all, there is no browser support for it, now and ever. 

But…

WebRTC is at long last supported in all modern browsers, with some players being particularly late to the game. And while it’s no RTMP (in fact it’s vastly superior to it) it lets you grab a live feed of your camera and transmit it to a fellow WebRTC endpoint, be it a browser or anything else. 

Thus, there’s no stopping us from putting together a proxy that sets up one such WebRTC endpoint (connecting to the broadcasting browser), and also converts and repackages the incoming feed into working RTMP to be pushed to a 3rd party platform or server. Like this

The fabulous perk is that most WebRTC enabled browsers can, according to standard, encode in H264 so there will be no need to transcode the video at all. Audio coming out of the browser is usually Opus and that we’ll want to transcode into AAC for compatibility. That’s still a big win as audio transcoding requires a lot less processing than video would. 

The nugget

As with other solutions, tried to smooth out the learning curve by offering a working prototype to be deployed asap. It sets up the webpage and ‘proxy’ bundle in a few clicks, effectively making it look like you’re broadcasting your webcam to a customizable RTMP address, all from the comfort of your own browser. You’ll still have to go through the hurdle of setting up and providing a key/certificate pair as WebRTC requires HTTPS more often than not.

POC is powered by the amazing MediaSoup framework, and much of the code is recycled from this handy sample. Work is part of a bigger effort to rejuvenate a commercial browser broadcasting enabled product, originally built on top of Kurento.

Does it scale?

With a bit of care and planning it will. Bottleneck being the processing toll it takes on transcoding the audio. Think a midrange computer/server will easily proxy 20 simultaneous streams. 

Also need to take into account that some browsers still won’t encode H264 (e.g. Firefox on Android) and it’ll have to default to VP8/9 which needs transcoded to work with RTMP.

Is it stable/reliable?

Better than the real thing! As the last mile (first actually) is delivered via WebRTC — which features UDP transport, adjustable bitrate, congestion control, forward error correction and other cool stuff — the overall quality of service will be superior to the scenario where you would have broadcast the same camera with (e.g.) Wirecast, given the same encoding profile (i.e. constrained baseline) and resolution, especially over unpredictable networks or when employed by your non-streaming-savvy website users.

Is it fast?

Relatively so. Think sub-second WebRTC browser-to-proxy and 2-3 seconds RTMP proxy-to-platform. Not good enough for a video call but at least bound to be consistent, as compared to an unpredictable 2-30 second direct RTMP connection. There is extra delay introduced by the need to transcode, but that’s like half a second at most. 

Is it expensive?

I say no, but depends on what you’d be using it for, and the scale you’d be using it at. Processing juice for transcoding the audio would set you back under a cent per hour per stream; if it were to be separate that is, yet the proxying and transcoding needs to be thought of as part of the bigger picture and possibly run on a system that’s often idle.

Is it secure?

Yes, actually. WebRTC is always encrypted, unlike RTMP.

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