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.
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.
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 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.
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 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.
moq also has nix support see nix/README.md
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)