OBS Studio Real-time Streaming: A Deep Dive into WHIP, WebRTC, RTMP & SRT

OBS (Open Broadcaster Software) is the world’s most popular free open-source software for video and audio mixing, production, and live streaming. There is a good chance that your 10-year-old kid has used it to live stream Minecraft to Twitch or Youtube Live. In fact, the Twitch team was instrumental in helping us to add the WHIP protocol and WebRTC to OBS Studio.

The Millicast (CoSmo Software) team originally added generic support for WebRTC in OBS Studio in 2018 to enable real-time streaming over WebRTC to our platform. Why? Because other protocols like RTMP added well over a second of latency, and our customers needed a way to stream in under half of a second from “glass-to-glass”, from capture to playback. We still maintain our forked version of OBS Studio WebRTC that supports Simulcast and other unique features.

The next step in the evolution of WebRTC as a broadcast and streaming protocol was to standardize the way you could send a stream to Millicast, or other WebRTC media servers or services. That was the idea behind WHIP (WebRTC HTTP Ingest Protocol), an IETF standard developed in 2021 by Sergio Garcia Murillo (CTO, Millicast).

WHIP has become so popular that the release of OBS Studio 30.0 in early 2024 added support for WHIP to enable real-time streaming with low latency and wide device compatibility. You can download OBS v30 or newer here. And “Millicast” was recently added as a “Service” under Stream Settings in OBS for easy connectivity. But the core OBS Studio projects uses a different implementation of WebRTC, and still lacks some important features included in the forked Millicast version of OBS WebRTC.

In this webinar, we’ll do a deep dive into:

The differences between these versions of OBS Studio
The differences between WHIP, WebRTC, RTMP and SRT streaming protocols
Comparing features like Simulcast and multi-bitrate (MBR)
Other advanced features that can optimize your streaming workflows for your specific use case