Guides & Articles

SRT Protocol

Secure Reliable Transport

High-quality, low-latency, and secure live videos

Secure Reliable Transport (SRT) is a royalty-free, open-source video transport protocol that supports low-latency, high-performance streaming, over noisy or unpredictable networks such as the public internet. Matrox is a member of the SRT Alliance that manages and promotes the use of the SRT protocol.

As a fierce advocate of interoperability and standards, Matrox was among the early supporters of SRT. Matrox has implemented support for the SRT protocol in its current and upcoming encoding and decoding solutions. At InfoComm, Matrox also hosted a multi-vendor SRT open source interoperability showcase to demonstrate SRT-ready products working together.

Matrox received very strong and positive feedback from the AV and IT communities during discussions about SRT at events like ISE and InfoComm. The main reason SRT generates excitement with IT thought leaders among enterprise and government end-users; online video platforms; content delivery networks; enterprise video content management systems; and hardware, software, and services internet streaming infrastructure companies is that SRT is a viable replacement for the aging RTMP protocol. It addresses security concerns and focuses on performance video – even through public internet infrastructure.
 
The consumption of high-performance video in businesses, governments, schools, and defense is on a sharp rise. Many protocols have addressed compatibility distribution of streaming video to very large volume of viewers consuming content from disparate devices and appliances. However, one of the best ways to leverage the assets already on premises at various organizations, as well as the considerable investment by service providers in the cloud, is to feed streaming distribution tools with very low-latency video and do so very reliably. SRT takes some of the best aspects of User Datagram Protocol (UDP), such as low latency, but adds error-checking to match the reliability of Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP). While TCP/IP handles all data profiles and is optimal for its job, SRT can address high-performance video specifically.

What are the benefits of using the SRT protocol?

  • Pristine quality video – SRT is designed to protect against jitter, packet loss, and bandwidth fluctuations due to congestion over noisy networks for the best viewing experience possible. This is done through advanced low latency retransmission techniques that compensate for and manage the packet loss. SRT can withstand up to 10% packet loss with no visual degradation to the stream.
  • Low latency – In spite of dealing with network challenges, video and audio is delivered with low latency. It has the combined advantages of the reliability of TCP/IP delivery and the speed of UDP.
  • Secure end-to-end transmission – Industry-standard AES 128/256-bit encryption ensures protection of content over the internet. SRT provides simplified firewall traversal.
  • Leveraging the internet – Because SRT ensures security and reliability, the public internet is now viable for an expanded range of streaming applications—like streaming to socialcast cloud sites (for example, LiveScale omnicast multi-cloud platform's concurrent distribution to multiple social media such as Facebook Live, YouTube, Twitch and Periscope from one live video feed), streaming or remoting an entire video wall content, or regions of interest of a video wall, and more.
  • Interoperability – Users can confidently deploy SRT through their entire video and audio streaming workflows knowing that multi-vendor products will work together seamlessly.
  • Open source – Royalty-free, next-generation open source protocol leads to cost-effective, interoperable, and future-proofed solutions.
Credit: SRT Alliance

SRT Open-Source Interoperability

 

SRT in Action

 

SRT in action: At InfoComm 2018, Matrox collaborated with CineMassive, Haivision, LiveScale, Lumens, and Wowza, to host a live demo of SRT open source interoperability.

 

Maevex 6150 and LiveScale

Matrox Maevex 6150 quad 4K enterprise encoders stream multiple 4K signals to the LiveScale omnicast platform for live video publishing and delivery to web, mobile, broadcast, and social media destinations including Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter.

 

Mura IPX Series and SRT

Mura IPX Series and SRT

 

Matrox SRT-Ready Products

Maevex 6100 Series

Maevex 6100 Series encoders – These 4K/UHD encoder cards and appliances support all the popular transport protocols for IP video streams, including SRT. Dual and quad 4K/UHD encoders deliver simultaneous, quad 4K capture, stream, and record—with options to stream and record even more channels in different configurations , and with zero latency pass-through for real-time streaming. All of this on a standard one Gigabit Ethernet network. 

Maevex 6120 dual 4K and Maevex 6150 quad 4K encoding appliances can easily feed cloud-based servers via SRT to reach internet viewers, push many streams on-premises over the LAN for local audiences with SRT or other protocols, and record to local or network storage for later editing and viewing—all concurrently.

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Mura IPX Series

Mura IPX Series capture cards – SRT-enabled video wall cards deliver high-density 4K capture, encode, decode, and display capabilities to video wall controllers. Users can select and transmit regions of interest of a video wall, or the entire video wall, to a remote location or device, securely over the internet.

For example, in a control room environment, being able to stream pertinent portions of the video wall to the mobile phones of others who are not in the control room at the time of a crisis, can help greatly with decision making.

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Maevex 6100 Quad 4K Enterprise Encoder Card

Mura IPX Series multiviewers – SRT-enabled high-density 4K IP decode and display cards empower OEMs and integrators to create IP-based 4K multiviewers and personal video walls. Mura IPX-O multiviewers can take in SRT-compliant streams from any device, from any location in the world. 

For example, SRT-compliant cameras that are in a remote site can stream content over the internet to a Mura IPX-O decoder in a different location, to be displayed on a 2x2 video wall. This is ideal for security, remote monitoring, and crisis management applications.

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Monarch EDGE Series

Monarch EDGE encoder/decoder – This 4K/multi-HD encoder/decoder pair supports many popular streaming protocols, including SRT. Users can transmit live streams from multiple SDI cameras at resolutions up to 4K or quad HD over managed or unmanaged networks with confidence using this compact, robust, and low-power encoder/decoder pair. In live production applications, Monarch EDGE can be used as a REMote Integration (REMI) encoder, securely delivering streams to production studios from remote events with some of the lowest glass-to-glass latencies on the market. Monarch EDGE encoder-generated streams include program time stamps, ensuring the feeds of synchronized cameras can be realigned at the time of decode by the Monarch EDGE decoder. Furthermore, these synchronized feeds can be genlocked to ensure seamless integration into studio environments.