Ant Media Server MoQ Plugin

Ant Media ships MoQ as an installable plugin for Ant Media Server 3.0.0 and later. It is listed here rather than in Built with MoQ because you download a zip, run an install script, and open a port on a server you operate — the classic shape of a component rather than a service.

Ant Media’s own documentation is refreshingly direct about maturity: MoQ is an evolving IETF standard, the plugin is early access, and you should expect to keep up with changes.

Built on moq-lite, not moq-transport

The detail that matters most for anyone comparing implementations: the AMS plugin is based on moq-lite, which Ant Media describes as a deployable subset of the spec — not on the numbered draft-ietf-moq-transport revisions. That is why this entry carries no draft tags. If you are planning interop against a draft-18 or draft-19 relay, this is not the same wire protocol, and that is a deliberate choice rather than an oversight.

How it fits together

The plugin installs an embedded MoQ relay listening on port 4443 (UDP and TCP), separate from the usual AMS ports, plus player and publisher pages served under the AMS webapp.

Publishing works two ways. The built-in browser publisher takes camera or screen and sends it in; or any moq-lite-compatible client can publish directly to the relay URL. Either way AMS picks the stream up as a normal broadcast, so recording, the REST API, and adaptive bitrate all continue to work.

Playback exposes a track per rendition:

• source — original quality as published into AMS
• 720p / 480p — AMS-transcoded ABR renditions, if enabled
• publish — the browser publisher’s stream directly, bypassing the AMS pipeline entirely, which is the lowest-overhead path but gives up ABR, recording, and everything else

That last option is an unusually honest piece of product design: it exposes the tradeoff rather than hiding it, and it is a neat illustration of what MoQ makes cheap — an alternate delivery path that skips the server’s media pipeline is a routing decision, not a second product.

Constraints worth knowing before you install

• Ant Media Server 3.0.0+, Linux x86_64, sudo access
• Chromium-based browsers only for playback — Safari is unsupported, Firefox is described as unstable
• HTTPS is mandatory on real servers, since browsers only permit WebTransport over HTTPS (localhost excepted)
• Port 4443 must be open inbound for the embedded relay

Ant Media was one of the eleven vendors in the NAB 2026 MoQ interoperability demonstration.