What is the advantage of RTSP over plain HTTP for static files?

Is there any advantage of using RTSP for serving static (not live stream) TS videos?

HTTP looks like better for this purpose and triggers less bugs in client software. Seeking works better, fast-forward playback works smoother. It also does n开发者_开发知识库ot require any indexes.

Are there any pitfalls when migrating from RTSP to plain HTTP?

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Usage of HTTP for media streaming, while sponsored by Apple iOS products, is probably not as standard as RTSP. There are many HTTP streaming implementations, whose issues are mainly:

• inability to PAUSE;
• byte-range seeks.

Other than this, HTTP is better for many reasons.

See this article.

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HTTP "streaming" servers will (in most cases) use TCP as their network transport, RTSP servers usually offer RTP over UDP which is more suited to multimedia streaming where some errors/packet loss can be tolerated with the benefit of lower latency and less network overheads.

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Also, as RTSP it is over UDP, it can be used inside LAN with multicast/broadcast. This is quite useful for TV streams as you will use less bandwidth.