No matter how unreliable your network, SRT can recover from severe packet loss and jitter, ensuring the integrity and quality of your video streams.

SRT’s stream error correction is configurable to accommodate a user’s deployment conditions. Leveraging real-time IP communications development to extend traditional network error recovery practices, SRT delivers media with significantly lower latency than TCP/IP, while offering the speed of UDP transmission with greatly improved reliability.

Unlike some other streaming protocols that only support specific video and audio formats, SRT is payload agnostic. Because SRT operates at the network transport level, acting as a wrapper around your content, it can transport any type of video format, codec, resolution, or frame rate.

The handshaking process used by SRT supports outbound connections without the potential risks and dangers of permanent exterior ports being opened in a firewall, thereby maintaining corporate LAN security policies and minimizing the need for IT intervention.

Using 128/192/256-bit AES encryption trusted by governments and organizations around the world, SRT ensures that valuable content is protected end-to-end from contribution to distribution so that no unauthorized parties can listen.

SRT 1.4 sees the introduction of the packet filter API. This mechanism allows custom processing to be performed on network packets on the sender side before they are sent, and on the receiver side once received from the network. The API allows users to write their own plugin, thereby extending the SRT protocol's capabilities even further with all kinds of different packet filtering. Users can manipulate the resulting packet filter data in any way, such as for custom encryption, packet inspection, or accessing data before it is sent.

The first plugin created as an example of what can be achieved with the packet filter API is for Forward Error Correction (FEC) which, in certain use cases, can offer slightly lower latency than Automatic Repeat reQuest (ARQ). This plugin allows three different modes:

• ARQ only – retransmits lost packets,
• FEC only – provides the overhead needed for FEC recovery on the receiver side,
• FEC and ARQ – retransmits lost packets that FEC fails to recover.

Similar to SMPTE-2022-7 over managed networks, Connection Bonding adds seamless stream protection and hitless failover to the SRT protocol. This technology relies on more than one IP network path to prevent disruption to live video streams in the event of network congestion or outages, maintaining continuity of service.

This is accomplished using the socket groups introduced in SRT v1.5. The general concept of socket groups means having a group that contains multiple sockets, where one operation for sending one data signal is applied to the group. Single sockets inside the group will take over this operation and do what is necessary to deliver the signal to the receiver.

Two modes are supported:

• Broadcast - In Broadcast mode, data is sent redundantly over all the member links in a group. If one of the links fails or experiences network jitter and/or packet loss, the missing data will be received over another link in the group. Redundant packets are simply discarded at the receiver side.

• Main/Backup - In Main/Backup mode, only one (main) link at a time is used for data transmission while other (backup) connections are on standby to ensure the transmission will continue if the main link fails. The goal of Main/Backup mode is to identify a potential link break before it happens, thus providing a time window within which to seamlessly switch to one of the backup links.

Access Control enables the upstream application to assign a Stream ID to individual SRT streams. By using a unique Stream ID, either automatically generated or customized, the upstream application can send multiple SRT streams to a single IP address and UDP port. The Stream IDs can then be used by a receiver to identify and differentiate between ingest streams, apply user password access methods, and in some cases even apply automation based on the naming of the Stream ID. For example, contribution could be sent to a video production workflow and monitoring to a monitoring service.

For broadcasters, Stream ID is key to replacing RTMP for ingesting video streams, especially HEVC/H.265 content, into cloud service or CDNs that have a single IP socket (address + port) open for incoming video.