Open-source RTP library for high-speed 4K HEVC video streaming

Abstract

Efficient transport technologies for High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) are key enablers for economic 4K video transmission in current telecommunication networks. This paper introduces a novel open-source Real-time Transport Protocol (RTP) library called uvgRTP for high-speed 4K HEVC video streaming. Our library supports the latest RFC 3550 specification for RTP and an associated RFC 7798 RTP payload format for HEVC. It is written in C++ under a permissive 2-clause BSD license and it can be run on both Linux and Windows operating systems with a user-friendly interface. Our experiments on an Intel Core i7-4770 CPU show that uvgRTP is able to stream HEVC video at 5.0 Gb/s over a local 10 Gb/s network. It attains 4.4 times as high peak goodput and 92.1% lower latency than the state-of-the-art FFmpeg multimedia framework. It also outperforms LIVE555 with over double the goodput and 82.3% lower latency. These results indicate that uvgRTP is currently the fastest open-source RTP library for 4K HEVC video streaming.