WHIP, NDI and Janus: genesis of a broadcasting demo
Going live on at
The broadcasting industry has some staples it typically relies on: almost everyone uses the same protocols to upload (RTMP) and distribute (HLS) the streams they produce, and they often rely on well known tools (like OBS, XSplit or others) to help for the job. While effective, these technologies have some limitations when it comes to lower the distribution latency. For different reasons, though, WebRTC is not that widespread in that community, especially when you want to use WebRTC rather than HLS to distribute your produced media in real-time instead. WHIP, a new standard signalling protocol for broadcasting ingest via WebRTC, is trying to address exactly this missing step, in order to make it easier to use WebRTC for the purpose.
That said, standardizing WHIP is only a first step. Considering how accustomed streamers are to their tools, WebRTC won't really be an option until a way to use WHIP from those applications is made available as well. Taking into account that a native integration of WHIP and WebRTC in those tools may take some time, until then it may be worth to experiment with looser integrations instead. Within that context, when it comes to media production NDI is a de-facto standard in the broadcasting industry, as it makes it easy to exchange uncompressed streams within a LAN to use as media sources. This talk will indeed try to combine those technologies together, and share a few practical information and details about some actual experiments to produce media in OBS, output it via NDI, and then broadcast the result via WebRTC thanks to WHIP and the open source Janus WebRTC Server.