// the find
ant-media/Ant-Media-Server
Ant Media Server — Ultra-low latency streaming engine with WebRTC (~0.5s), SRT, RTMP, HLS, CMAF, adaptive bitrate, transcoding & scaling
Ant Media Server is a Java-based media server built on Red5, handling WebRTC, RTMP, HLS, SRT, and CMAF for live streaming with sub-second latency. It targets developers building video platforms — telehealth, e-learning, live shopping — who need a self-hosted alternative to cloud media services. The community edition covers the basics; meaningful features like cluster scaling and adaptive bitrate require the enterprise license.
The protocol breadth is real: WebRTC ingress/egress, SRT for contribution feeds, RTMP for OBS compatibility, and LL-HLS for broad playback — all in one server rather than a stack of separate tools. The plugin API (IFrameListener, IPacketListener) lets you tap raw frames or packets without forking the core, which is genuinely useful for ML inference or custom recording pipelines. ONVIF IP camera discovery is built in, not bolted on — useful if you're building a surveillance or multi-camera broadcast setup. Active development: last push was two days ago with CI and OWASP dependency scanning in place.
The community/enterprise split is aggressive — adaptive bitrate transcoding and cluster scaling are enterprise-only, so the open-source edition is a demo for most production use cases, not a deployable product. The codebase carries Red5 ancestry throughout (org.red5 package tree everywhere), which means you're inheriting a decade of Flash-era design decisions underneath the modern protocol support. Documentation lives on their marketing site, not in the repo, so you're dependent on their CDN staying up to understand how anything works. The datastore abstraction supports MongoDB, Redis, and MapDB in addition to in-memory — a sprawl that suggests the core data model was never cleanly defined, and you'll hit inconsistencies if you deviate from the happy path.