# Warp Segmented live media delivery protocol utilizing QUIC streams. See the [Warp draft](https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-lcurley-warp/). Warp works by delivering each audio and video segment as a separate QUIC stream. These streams are assigned a priority such that old video will arrive last and can be dropped. This avoids buffering in many cases, offering the viewer a potentially better experience. # Limitations ## Browser Support This demo currently only works on Chrome for two reasons: 1. WebTransport support. 2. [Media underflow behavior](https://github.com/whatwg/html/issues/6359). The ability to skip video abuses the fact that Chrome can play audio without video for up to 3 seconds (hardcoded!) when using MSE. It is possible to use something like WebCodecs instead... but that's still Chrome only at the moment. ## Streaming This demo works by reading pre-encoded media and sleeping based on media timestamps. Obviously this is not a live stream; you should plug in your own encoder or source. The media is encoded on disk as a LL-DASH playlist. There's a crude parser and I haven't used DASH before so don't expect it to work with arbitrary inputs. ## QUIC Implementation This demo uses a fork of [quic-go](https://github.com/lucas-clemente/quic-go). There are two critical features missing upstream: 1. ~~[WebTransport](https://github.com/lucas-clemente/quic-go/issues/3191)~~ 2. [Prioritization](https://github.com/lucas-clemente/quic-go/pull/3442) ## Congestion Control This demo uses a single rendition. A production implementation will want to: 1. Change the rendition bitrate to match the estimated bitrate. 2. Switch renditions at segment boundaries based on the estimated bitrate. 3. or both! Also, quic-go ships with the default New Reno congestion control. Something like [BBRv2](https://github.com/lucas-clemente/quic-go/issues/341) will work much better for live video as it limits RTT growth. # Setup ## Requirements * Go * ffmpeg * openssl * Chrome Canary ## Media This demo simulates a live stream by reading a file from disk and sleeping based on media timestamps. Obviously you should hook this up to a real live stream to do anything useful. Download your favorite media file: ``` wget http://commondatastorage.googleapis.com/gtv-videos-bucket/sample/BigBuckBunny.mp4 -O media/source.mp4 ``` Use ffmpeg to create a LL-DASH playlist. This creates a segment every 2s and MP4 fragment every 10ms. ``` ffmpeg -i media/source.mp4 -f dash -use_timeline 0 -r:v 24 -g:v 48 -keyint_min:v 48 -sc_threshold:v 0 -tune zerolatency -streaming 1 -ldash 1 -seg_duration 2 -frag_duration 0.01 -frag_type duration media/playlist.mpd ``` You can increase the `frag_duration` (microseconds) to slightly reduce the file size in exchange for higher latency. ## TLS Unfortunately, QUIC mandates TLS and makes local development difficult. If you have a valid certificate you can use it instead of self-signing. The go binaries take a `-cert` and `-key` argument. Skip the remaining steps in this section. Otherwise, use [mkcert](https://github.com/FiloSottile/mkcert) to install a self-signed CA: ``` mkcert -install ``` With no arguments, the server will generate self-signed cert using this root CA. ## Server The Warp server defaults to listening on UDP 4443. It supports HTTP/3 and WebTransport, pushing media over WebTransport streams once a connection has been established. A more refined implementation would load content based on the WebTransport URL or some other messaging scheme. ``` cd server go run main.go ``` ## Web Player The web assets need to be hosted with a HTTPS server. If you're using a self-signed certificate, you will need to ignore the security warning in Chrome (Advanced -> proceed to localhost). This can be avoided by adding your certificate to the root CA but I'm too lazy to do that. ``` cd player yarn install yarn serve ``` These can be accessed on `https://127.0.0.1:4444` by default. ## Chrome Now we need to make Chrome accept these certificates, which normally would involve trusting a root CA but this was not working with WebTransport when I last tried. Instead, we need to run a *fresh instance* of Chrome, instructing it to allow our self-signed certificate. This command will not work if Chrome is already running, so it's easier to use Chrome Canary instead. Launch a new instance of Chrome Canary: ``` /Applications/Google\ Chrome\ Canary.app/Contents/MacOS/Google\ Chrome\ Canary --allow-insecure-localhost --origin-to-force-quic-on=127.0.0.1:4443 https://127.0.0.1:4444 ```