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Comment by codefined | Hacker News Reader

Most important thing for me is the latency of the streaming solution. Discord seem to do really well here, with <1 second latency times. You done any measurements with your solution to suggest how much latency there is between the server and the client?

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If you're connecting to the RTMP server directly, you can get about 1-2s latency. However, due to the additional overhead of the conversion process to HLS, I'm getting about 6-10 seconds of latency.

I have considered looking into WebRTC, but it seems a bit more complicated to work with than just running an RTMP server and calling it a day.

Both Apple and Twitch have their own implementation of low latency HLS, so it could be worth looking into how feasible it would be to setup something similar.

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/http_live_streamin...

Lowering hls_fragment[1] to 1s should help out a little with the latency. This is what I've done in the past with a similar project as yours, Open Streaming Platform[2], with good results.

Since you mentioned WebRTC for streaming to provide even lower latency, this is what I believe Project Lightspeed has achieved[3]. Might be something you'd be interested in, if you hadn't already seen it.

[1] https://wiki.openstreamingplatform.com/Usage/Streaming#osp-n...

[2] https://wiki.openstreamingplatform.com/Usage/Streaming#osp-n...

[3] https://github.com/GRVYDEV/Project-Lightspeed

I've experimented a bit with lowering the hls_fragment value and the playlist length, and found that fragments smaller than 2 seconds caused too much buffering on the end client for it to be stable - which resulted in higher latency than before.

I'm looking into the latency issues and I've started drafting up possible solutions. Low latency MPEG-DASH might be something to experiment with. It won't reach sub-second latency, but it will definitely be better than HLS.

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