QUIC

Video: QUIC in Theory and Practice

Posted on by Russell Trafford-Jones


Most online video streaming uses HTTP to deliver the video to the player in the same way web pages are delivered to the browser. So QUIC – a replacement for HTTP – will affect us professionally and personally.

This video explains how HTTP works and takes us on the journey to seeing why QUIC (which should eventually be called HTTP/3) speeds up the process of requesting and delivering files. Simply put there are ways to reduce the number of times messages have to be passed between the player and the server which reduces overall overhead. But one big win is its move away from TCP to UDP.

Robin Marx delivers these explanations by reference to superheroes and has very clear diagrams leading to this low-level topic being pleasantly accessible and interesting.

There are plenty of examples which show easy-to-see gains website speed using QUIC over both HTTP and HTTP/2 but QUIC’s worth in the realm of live streaming is not yet clear. There are studies showing it makes streaming worse, but also ones showing it helps. Video players have a lot of logic in them and are the result of much analysis, so it wouldn’t surprise me at all to see the state of the art move forward, for players to optimise for QUIC delivery and then all tests to show an improvement with QUIC streaming.

QUIC is coming, one way or another, so find out more.
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Speaker

Robin Marx Robin Marx
Web Performance Researcher,
Hasslet University

Video: Making Video Streams QUICer

Posted on by Russell Trafford-Jones

There are many ways to speed up live streaming and much work has gone in to reducing chunk lengths for HLS-style streaming, WebRTC has arrived on the scene and techniques to speed up chunk delivery are in production in CDNs around the world.

But we shouldn’t forget lower down in the detail, we have how the web sites are actually saved to customers – the venerable HTTP. Running on TCP/IP, HTTP packets are delivered using very thorough acknowledgement mechanisms within TCP/IP. Furthermore, it’s immune to spoofing attacks due to a three way handshake to set up the connection.

However, all this communication ads latency as even for low latency connections, these communications can add up to a significant latency and affect the speed of the throughout of the connection.

This talk introduces QUIC which is a replacement for HTTP developed by Google which uses UDP as its underlying delivery mechanism, thus avoiding much of this built-in two way comms.

At the Mile High Video event, Miroslav Ponec from Akamai introduces this protocol which is undergoing standardisation at the IETF explaining how it works and why it’s such a good idea.

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Speaker

Miroslav Ponec Miroslav Ponec
Engineering Director,
Akamai Technologies

Video: The Quest for Low-Latency Live Video

Posted on by Russell Trafford-Jones


A great discussion from Streaming Media East discussing the battle to achieve Low-Latency Live Video by speakers from BAMTECH, Limelight and Red5Pro.In this session, learn about the pros and cons of various technologies on both the contribution and delivery side of lowlatency streaming, including small chunk size HLS/DASH, WebRTC, WebSockets, QUIC, SRT, and CMAF:

  • What does ‘Low Latency’ mean? Realtime? Are Cable & TV low-latency?
  • How do you synchronise OTT with Data and TV
  • Where is latency introduced? Which buffers have the biggest impact?
  • How can you fight rebuffing and which metric is the most useful?
  • Pros and Cons of WebRTC
  • How to stream 4K/VR?
  • Plus Q&A

Speakers
Jason Hofmann, VP of Architecture, Limelight Networks
Bill Zurat, VP, Core Media, BAMTECH Media
Chris Allen, CEO and Co-founder, Red5Pro and Red5

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