SRS Review, Pricing & Features

SRS is a free, open-source real-time video server supporting RTMP, WebRTC, HLS, and SRT. Learn features, use cases, and how it compares.

Category
Media & Audio/Video Tools
Pricing
open-source, from Free
Verified
Not yet
Last updated
July 19, 2026
Founded
2013
APIOpen SourceSelf-Hosted

What Is SRS

SRS, short for Simple Realtime Server, is an open-source real-time video streaming server that began development in 2013. It is designed to be a lightweight but high-efficiency media server capable of ingesting live video from encoders like OBS Studio or FFmpeg and redistributing it across a wide range of streaming protocols.

The project is maintained as a community-driven open-source effort under the ossrs GitHub organization and published at ossrs.io. SRS is written in ANSI C++ and uses coroutine-based concurrency, which its maintainers describe as avoiding the complexity of traditional async callback-based streaming server designs, while remaining portable across Linux, Windows, and macOS.

Key Features

SRS supports an unusually broad set of streaming protocols out of the box, including RTMP, WebRTC, HLS, HTTP-FLV, HTTP-TS, SRT, MPEG-DASH, and GB28181, along with codec support for H.264, H.265, AV1, VP9, AAC, Opus, and G.711. This lets SRS act as a protocol gateway, converting a single incoming stream, for example RTMP from OBS, into multiple output formats simultaneously, such as WebRTC for low-latency browser playback and HLS for broad compatibility. SRS is also built to be cloud-native, with an official Docker image, Kubernetes deployment support, and built-in telemetry for monitoring streaming infrastructure at scale.

Pricing

SRS is completely free and open source under the MIT license, with no paid tiers, subscriptions, or per-stream fees from the project itself. Organizations deploy SRS on their own servers or cloud infrastructure and pay only for their own hosting and bandwidth costs. Support is community-based through GitHub issues, the project blog, and documentation rather than a commercial support contract.

Key Features

Pros & Cons

Pros

  • Completely free and open source with no licensing costs
  • Supports an unusually wide range of streaming protocols in a single server
  • Cloud-native design makes it straightforward to deploy in Docker and Kubernetes environments
  • Active GitHub community and ongoing development since 2013
  • Coroutine-based architecture is designed for high concurrency without callback complexity

Cons

  • Requires self-hosting and infrastructure management, with no managed SaaS offering
  • Documentation and community support are primarily developer-oriented, with a learning curve for newcomers
  • No official enterprise support contract or SLA from a company
  • Best suited to teams with backend and DevOps expertise rather than non-technical users
  • Advanced protocol conversion setups can require careful configuration to avoid latency or quality issues

Pricing

Frequently Asked Questions

Is SRS free?

Yes, SRS is completely free and open source under the MIT license.

What does SRS stand for?

SRS stands for Simple Realtime Server.

What protocols does SRS support?

SRS supports RTMP, WebRTC, HLS, HTTP-FLV, HTTP-TS, SRT, MPEG-DASH, and GB28181.

When was SRS started?

The SRS project began in 2013.

Can SRS run in Docker?

Yes, SRS provides an official Docker image and supports Kubernetes deployment.

What is SRS used for?

SRS is used to build live streaming platforms, video conferencing backends, and protocol-conversion gateways between RTMP, SRT, and WebRTC.

What programming language is SRS written in?

SRS is written in ANSI C++ (98).

Does SRS support low-latency streaming?

Yes, SRS can output WebRTC and SRT for low-latency delivery in addition to higher-latency formats like HLS.

Related Tools