[gst-devel] Ideal pipe for streaming live with minimal delay

[Edward Hervey]

On Thu, 2010-08-05 at 07:30 -0700, 0rr3 wrote:
> This all works great except that a increasing delay of the live stream ruins
> everything.
> The ip camera stream is received over a mobile 3g network and therefore we
> are forced to use TCP instead of UDP due to heavy packet loss.

  You've just stated the root cause of your problem, you're using TCP
instead of UDP.

  TCP will guarantee packet-delivery by asking for packet
re-transmission, which increases the latency (more.. and more... and
more... ).
  UDP doesn't guarantee packet-delivery but otoh will offer constant
latency (give or take a little jitter on the network side).

  If you're seeing a lot of packet loss you might want to consider
switching to:
  * either a lower bandwith codec/settings
  * or using a decoder than can cleanly recover from losses (not sure we
have one tbh)

  Other people might have other recommendations, but using TCP is
definitely a big no-no with RTP if you want to achieve low/constant
latency.

   Edward