Live Streaming
Streaming takes a video signal, compresses it into a manageable data stream, and ships it out over a network to a platform. The compression happens in an encoder, which applies a codec. H.264 is the universal baseline that plays everywhere; HEVC, or H.265, achieves the same quality at roughly half the bitrate but asks more of the processor. Whichever you use, the number that matters most is the bitrate, and the trick is choosing one the uplink can actually sustain. Set it too high and the buffer starves and the stream stalls; set it too low and the picture falls apart into blocks. A safe target sits well under your measured upload capacity, leaving headroom for the network's bad moments rather than betting on its best ones.
Getting the stream from your encoder to the platform is the job of a protocol. RTMP is the long-established ingest standard, while newer options like SRT and RTMP-over-TLS add resilience and security over connections you cannot fully trust. Settings like the keyframe interval and encoder latency let you trade how quickly the stream recovers from a glitch against how much delay it adds.
The hard-won lesson of live streaming is that stability beats peak quality every time. Viewers will happily watch a slightly softer picture, but they leave the moment it starts buffering. So you cap the bitrate conservatively, run a wired uplink wherever you can, and keep a bonded or backup connection ready for anything that truly matters.
A stable stream beats a perfect one that drops.