Warp

Live media delivery protocol utilizing QUIC streams. See the Warp draft.

Warp works by delivering media over independent 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.

This demo requires WebTransport and WebCodecs, which currently (May 2023) only works on Chrome.

Development

Easy Mode

Requires Docker only.

docker-compose up --build

Then open https://localhost:4444/ in a browser. You'll have to click past the TLS error, but that's the price you pay for being lazy. Follow the more in-depth instructions if you want a better development experience.

Requirements

• Go
• Rust
• ffmpeg
• openssl
• Chrome

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 and convert it to fragmented MP4:

wget http://commondatastorage.googleapis.com/gtv-videos-bucket/sample/BigBuckBunny.mp4 -O media/source.mp4
./media/fragment

Certificates

Unfortunately, QUIC mandates TLS and makes local development difficult. If you have a valid certificate you can use it instead of self-signing.

Otherwise, we use mkcert to install a self-signed CA:

./generate/cert

With no arguments, the server will generate self-signed cert using this root CA. This certificate is only valid for 2 weeks due to how WebTransport performs certificate fingerprinting.

Server

The Warp server supports WebTransport, pushing media over 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
cargo run

This listens for WebTransport connections (not HTTP) on https://localhost:4443 by default.

Web

The web assets need to be hosted with a HTTPS server.

cd web
yarn install
yarn serve

These can be accessed on https://localhost:4444 by default.