TCP vs UDP on video stream

Question

I just came home from my exam in network-programming, and one of the question they asked us was \"If you are going to stream video, would you use TCP or UDP? Give an

Answer 1

If the bandwidth is far higher than the bitrate, I would recommend TCP for unicast live video streaming.

Case 1: Consecutive packets are lost for a duration of several seconds. => live video will stop on the client side whatever the transport layer is (TCP or UDP). When the network recovers: - if TCP is used, client video player can choose to restart the stream at the first packet lost (timeshift) OR to drop all late packets and to restart the video stream with no timeshift. - if UDP is used, there is no choice on the client side, video restart live without any timeshift. => TCP equal or better.

Case 2: some packets are randomly and often lost on the network. - if TCP is used, these packets will be immediately retransmitted and with a correct jitter buffer, there will be no impact on the video stream quality/latency. - if UDP is used, video quality will be poor. => TCP much better