In simple English
This tool receives live video from your camera and sends it to your viewers. It runs on your own server and handles many popular streaming formats. You can use it to build your own live broadcasting service. It costs nothing to download and run under an open licence. You will need a server to host it and some technical knowledge to configure it.
What it is
SRS (Simple Realtime Server) is a high-performance streaming media server written in C++. It ingests live video feeds and redistributes them across various protocols like WebRTC, SRT, and HLS.
What it is good for
Solo builders who want to host live video streaming, build a webcam service, or run a custom video broadcasting platform without paying expensive monthly fees to commercial video hosts.
- Supports nearly every major streaming protocol including WebRTC, SRT, and RTMP.
- Runs inside Docker (a way to run a program inside its own sealed box, so it cannot break anything else on your server) for simple setup.
- Available under the permissive MIT licence with zero mandatory software costs.
- Requires comfort with the command line and server administration to configure properly.
- High viewer counts will demand plenty of RAM (a computer's short-term memory for active tasks) and network bandwidth.
- Ongoing maintenance of the host server falls entirely on you.
commercial video streaming platforms like Wowza or expensive cloud transcoding services
FFmpeg for pushing video streams into the server
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docker run --rm -it -p 1935:1935 -p 1985:1985 -p 8080:8080 \
-p 8000:8000/udp -p 10080:10080/udp ossrs/srs:6