Easy to deploy and fantastic support

• By Jérôme Petazzoni - Tiny Shell Script - container.training
• on 06/13/2020

I was looking for a solution to provide low-latency (less than 1 second), high quality (1080p) video for online live training courses. All the streaming solutions that I tried (NGINX with the RTMP module, Wowza Streaming Cloud, AWS Elemental, Twitch, YouTube, DailyMotion, etc.) use HLS or MPEG-DASH, which are fantastic from a scalability perspective, but where the latency is much higher (5-30s).

I benchmarked 3 media servers: Wowza Streaming Engine, Ant Media Server, and Red5Pro. Wowza and Red5Pro also have great qualities, but I wasn't able to stream WebRTC with them (I use RTMP for ingest). However, with Ant Media Server, it worked almost immediately. No need to hand-edit XML files or get a beta version or whatever, it just worked.

Since I do not run my media server 24x7, having an option where I pay by the hour is an amazing value for me. I can just turn on or off my server when I need it for my courses.

Ant Media support was also extremely helpful and knowledgeable. For instance, while running my tests, at some point I experienced lots of dropped frames over WebRTC, while the same stream over HLS and RTMP looked perfect. In 10 minutes, Ahmet and his team they were able to point out that my encoder was using H264 high profile, which uses B frames, which aren't supported in WebRTC decoders (at least to this date). After switching my encoder's profile to baseline, the video was smooth, no more dropped frames. (This was particularly interesting to me because I thought that all recent H264 decoders would support high profile; but WebRTC is different, since it's optimized for low latency.)

I strongly recommend this product if it fits your use case; and I also strongly recommend getting paid support from the Ant Media team if you are having technical issues as I described above - it's 100% worth it.