Media over QUIC (MoQ) is a live media delivery protocol utilizing QUIC. It's a client-server model (not peer-to-peer) that is designed to scale to enormous viewership via clustered relay servers (aka a CDN). The application determines the trade-off between latency and quality, potentially on a per viewer-basis.

See quic.video for more information. Note: this project uses a forked implementation of the IETF standardization effort.

The project is split into a few crates:

• moq-transfork: The underlying network protocol. It's designed for media-like applications that need real-time and scale.
• moq-relay: A server that forwards content from publishers to any interested subscribers. It can optionally be clustered, allowing N servers to transfer between themselves.
• moq-karp: A simple media layer powered by moq-transfork, intended as a HLS/DASH/SDP replacement. It includes a CLI for converting between formats.
• moq-clock: A dumb clock client/server just to prove MoQ can be used for more than media.
• moq-native: Helpers to configure the native MoQ tools.

There are additional components that have been split into other repositories for development reasons:

• moq-gst: A gstreamer plugin for producing Karp broadcasts.
• moq-wasm: A web client utilizing Rust and WASM.
• moq-js: A web client utilizing Typescript.

At the moment moq-js contains the only mature player. A hosted version is available at quic.video and you can use the ?host=localhost:4443 query parameter to target a local moq-relay.

Usage

For quick iteration cycles, use the dev helper scripts.

To launch a full cluster, including provisioning certs and deploying root certificates, you can use docker-compose via:

make run

Then, visit https://quic.video/publish/?server=localhost:4443.

Usage

moq-relay

moq-relay is a server that forwards subscriptions from publishers to subscribers, caching and deduplicating along the way. It's designed to be run in a datacenter, relaying media across multiple hops to deduplicate and improve QoS.

Notable arguments:

• --bind <ADDR> Listen on this address, default: [::]:4443
• --tls-cert <CERT> Use the certificate file at this path
• --tls-key <KEY> Use the private key at this path
• --announce <URL> Forward all announcements to this address, typically a root relay.

This listens for WebTransport connections on UDP https://localhost:4443 by default. You need a client to connect to that address, to both publish and consume media.

moq-karp

moq-karp is a simple media layer on top of MoQ. The crate includes a binary that accepts fMP4 with a few restrictions:

• separate_moof: Each fragment must contain a single track.
• frag_keyframe: A keyframe must be at the start of each keyframe.
• fragment_per_frame: (optional) Each frame should be a separate fragment to minimize latency.

This can be used in conjunction with ffmpeg to publish media to a MoQ relay. See dev/pub for the required ffmpeg flags.

Alternatively, see moq-gst for a gstreamer plugin. This is in a separate repository to avoid gstreamer being a hard requirement.

moq-transfork

A media-agnostic library used by moq-relay and moq-karp to serve the underlying subscriptions. It has caching/deduplication built-in, so your application is oblivious to the number of connections under the hood.

See the published crate and documentation.

moq-clock

moq-clock is a simple client that can publish or subscribe to the current time. It's meant to demonstate that moq-transfork can be used for more than just media.

nix/nixos

moq also has nix support see nix/README.md

License

Licensed under either:

• Apache License, Version 2.0, (LICENSE-APACHE or http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0)
• MIT license (LICENSE-MIT or http://opensource.org/licenses/MIT)