From AirenSoft to OvenMedia Labs

We have changed our company name and our logo. Our new symbol is a honey badger. It is a name that has been with us for a long time, and an animal that reflects who we are today.

To explain why, we need to go back a little further than 2010.

Making a live channel redundant comes down to one thing: keeping the output of the two Origins behind your CDN, Primary and Backup, synchronized so that the player can switch between them at any time and keep playing without interruption.

With VOD this is easy. The files are pre-rendered and static, so any Origin serves the exact same bytes, and putting Primary/Backup behind a CDN is all it takes. Live is different. Each Origin cuts the stream into segments in real time, so even when both receive the same broadcast, their output does not line up on its own.

This post covers what has to line up to make a live channel truly redundant, and in particular how to synchronize the encoder-origin path.

Starting with the next release, the open-source edition of OvenMediaEngine will no longer provide hardware-accelerated features, including hardware encoder integrations such as NVIDIA. This was a difficult decision, and we want to begin by thanking everyone who has relied on these features over the years and asking for your understanding. Software-based features, including software encoding, remain fully supported, and no other features are affected.

RTSP has been the de facto protocol for IP cameras for over two decades. Almost every CCTV, IP camera, and network video device on the market speaks RTSP natively. It works well on dedicated NVR appliances and desktop clients. But the moment you try to bring those streams into a modern web or mobile dashboard, the cracks start to show.

The OvenMedia Labs blog is now hosted directly on our own domain. Going forward, deep dives into sub-second latency live streaming, OvenMediaEngine release notes, and field-tested guidance will all land here first.

Through this three-part series, we will explore ultra-low latency streaming with WebRTC in Part 1, various tests with HLS in Part 2, and finally, Low-Latency HLS in the last part.

While new technologies continue to emerge, HTTP Live Streaming (HLS) remains a stable, universal, and widely supported streaming protocol across the digital ecosystem because HLS was designed with a focus on stability to deliver media on a global scale. This required some level of buffering and latency to ensure a seamless viewing experience. However, with the increasing demand for two-way media services, the need for low-latency streaming has grown significantly.

In this blog series, we’ll explore how OvenMediaEngine enables faster, more stable streaming experiences. Many of you have asked about the core egress protocols that make this possible, so we’ll be diving into WebRTC, Low Latency HLS (LL-HLS), and Legacy HLS. Whether you’re curious about sub-second latency or optimizing streaming for large audiences, this series will provide the insights you’re looking for.

OvenMediaEngine is an open-source and sub-second latency streaming server capable of handling large-scale and high-definition streams. It can be installed and used in various environments, such as servers, CDNs, and Clouds. Today, we will show you how to easily use OvenMediaEngine by installing Docker on an AWS EC2 instance.

Do you want to provide stable and low-latency streaming to hundreds of thousands of viewers? Or perhaps, do you wish to share your low-latency stream only with authorized viewers?