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I'm playing around with Azure MediaServices and the live streaming feature. I'm using OBS as my streaming source and just trying to stream my desktop from my laptop and view it on my desktop machine.

It all works fine but there is a tremendous lag time (north of 30s). That's not really a "live" stream. I tried creating my live event with "low latency" checked to see if that would improve the lag time and it doesn't appear to have done anything.

I'm just doing a simple pass-through so no encoding on the server or anything. Is there something else I can do to improve the lag time besides the low latency toggle?

Blair Holmes
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  • Why are you using HLS if you need low latency? Any segmented streaming method has higher latency, by definition. (Yes, yes, you can use "low latency HLS", which at the end of the day is still extra overhead than just regular HTTP Progressive.) If you actually need low latency, consider WebRTC. (Just understand the tradeoffs you're making in the process. Most people don't actually need low latency.) – Brad Mar 30 '20 at 00:21
  • @Brad well I'm new to this streaming stuff so I'm not sure what HLS vs WebRTC is - my needs are to be able to stream in a "real-time" environment (just desktop screen sharing). Would WebRTC work for that better? Is there a way to set up WebRTC in Azure? I would like to stay in the Azure ecosystem if at all possible. – Blair Holmes Mar 30 '20 at 17:49
  • How low of latency do you need? And, how many people are you streaming to? (Also, somewhat related, check out this question and answer for some more information: https://stackoverflow.com/a/37475943/362536) – Brad Mar 30 '20 at 18:12
  • @Brad that's a great resource and I'll look at it more in depth this afternoon. Ideally I would like something under 5s and initially I will be streaming to at most 15 viewers. At first glance I don't see anything on your post you referenced about setting up WebRTC on azure. I did do some googling and got a few hits which talked about setting up a VM to handle that - do you have any other ideas/experience with WebRTC on Azure? – Blair Holmes Mar 30 '20 at 19:04
  • Sorry, I don't have any experience with Azure's offerings. – Brad Mar 31 '20 at 01:31

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There's good info on https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/media-services/latest/live-event-latency that talks about the low latency feature on the live event as well as a setting you set on the player. It also discusses the expected latencies.

David Bristol
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