Playback

Every live stream is available two ways at once, from the same ingest. You do not choose at publish time.

	WebRTC (WHEP)	HLS
Latency	Typically under a second	Several seconds
Reach	Modern browsers	Everything, including smart TVs
Best for	Auctions, betting, anything where the audience talks back	Scale, and long-tail devices

The built-in player

http://your-host:9001/watch/<application>/<stream>

Public and unauthenticated, meant to be shared. It prefers WebRTC and falls back to HLS. If the broadcast ends, the page says so and reconnects on its own if it starts again.

HLS in your own player

http://your-host:9001/live/<application>/<stream>/playlist.m3u8

A standard media playlist. Segment length and how much of the live window is retained are set in [hls].

Ad breaks appear as discontinuities, which conforming players handle without special support.

With adaptive bitrate on, the same URL serves a playlist of every rendition, and the player chooses between them as its connection changes. Nothing about the URL changes.

Viewer sessions

Each player that opens playlist.m3u8 is redirected once to a playlist address of its own:

/live/<application>/<stream>/s/<session>/playlist.m3u8

This is how Jadarit counts HLS viewers, and where each viewer’s own ads will go. Every player in common use follows the redirect without being told to. Only the playlists are per viewer: the segments they list are the same files for everyone, so a CDN in front of the server caches each one once.

A viewer counts while their player keeps asking for the playlist, and stops counting about 20 seconds after it stops. Query parameters on the first request, such as playlist.m3u8?device=tv, are kept with the session.

To turn sessions off, for a player that cannot follow a redirect, set sessions = false in [hls]. Playback works the same, but HLS viewers are no longer counted.

Viewer counts

The dashboard shows how many people are watching each stream, and the API returns it with every stream:

"viewers": { "hls": 41, "webrtc": 12, "total": 53 }

A WebRTC viewer counts from the moment they connect until the connection ends.

Behind a reverse proxy or CDN

Behind nginx, a load balancer or a CDN, every request reaches Jadarit from the proxy, and the viewer’s own address arrives in the X-Forwarded-For header. Jadarit believes that header only from the addresses listed in trusted_proxies under [server]: from anyone else, the header says whatever the sender chose.

The default trusts only the server itself, which covers nginx on the same machine and a Cloudflare Tunnel. If your CDN or load balancer connects from elsewhere, add its address ranges:

[server]
trusted_proxies = ["127.0.0.1/32", "::1/128", "10.0.0.0/8"]

Viewer addresses matter for ads. Ad servers choose and count ads by the viewer’s address, so a wrong one costs targeting, and a forged one would let anyone pass as any viewer.

WebRTC in your own player

Jadarit speaks WHEP. POST an SDP offer and play the answer:

POST /api/v1/apps/<application>/streams/<stream>/whep
Content-Type: application/sdp

const pc = new RTCPeerConnection();
pc.addTransceiver('video', { direction: 'recvonly' });
pc.addTransceiver('audio', { direction: 'recvonly' });

const offer = await pc.createOffer();
await pc.setLocalDescription(offer);

const res = await fetch(
  `/api/v1/apps/${app}/streams/${stream}/whep`,
  { method: 'POST', headers: { 'Content-Type': 'application/sdp' }, body: offer.sdp },
);
await pc.setRemoteDescription({ type: 'answer', sdp: await res.text() });

With adaptive bitrate on, the server moves each WebRTC viewer between renditions by itself, and a data channel named quality lets your player offer a quality menu. The protocol is in Adaptive bitrate.

Serving WebRTC beyond the LAN

WebRTC media is UDP and does not travel over an HTTP reverse proxy or a Cloudflare Tunnel. To reach viewers outside your network you need:

a reachable address to advertise. The server discovers one by STUN at startup, so this usually needs nothing from you. Set public_ip only when discovery would get it wrong, such as behind a load balancer.
a fixed udp_port_min/udp_port_max range, forwarded on your router. This one you do have to set: ephemeral ports cannot be forwarded.

Both are in [webrtc]. Leaving the range at 0/0 uses ephemeral ports, which works on a LAN and nowhere else.

jadarit doctor checks all of this from the server and prints the exact ports to forward, and to which address; see Diagnostics.