HaishinKit
A Swift library for camera and microphone live streaming via RTMP and SRT across Apple platforms.
What is HaishinKit?
HaishinKit is a mature, cross-platform streaming library that enables developers to integrate live video and audio publishing and playback into iOS, macOS, tvOS, and visionOS applications. It provides a robust foundation for building custom broadcasting apps, supporting industry-standard protocols like RTMP and SRT for reliable real-time media delivery.
Developers building live streaming applications for Apple platforms (iOS, macOS, tvOS, visionOS) who need to publish or play back video and audio streams. This includes app creators for broadcasting, video communication, or screen recording.
Developers choose HaishinKit for its decade of refinement, strict Swift concurrency compliance for modern safety, and native support for multi-camera access, multi-streaming, and screen capture on Apple ecosystems, offering a stable and performant alternative to building streaming infrastructure from scratch.
Overview
Camera and Microphone streaming library via RTMP and SRT for iOS, macOS, tvOS and visionOS.
Use Cases
Best For
- Building custom live broadcasting apps for iOS and macOS that publish to RTMP or SRT servers.
- Developing applications that require simultaneous camera access while other apps use the camera, such as on iPad.
- Creating apps that broadcast a single live stream to multiple services (multi-streaming) concurrently.
- Implementing screen recording and streaming functionality using ReplayKit on iOS or ScreenCaptureKit on macOS.
- Adding video overlays like watermarks, text, or bitmaps during live broadcasting or playback.
- Ensuring modern Swift code safety in streaming apps through strict concurrency compliance.
Not Ideal For
- Projects targeting web or Windows platforms, as HaishinKit is optimized for Apple ecosystems with Android handled via a separate codebase.
- Applications requiring stable WebRTC integration for peer-to-peer streaming, since WHEP/WHIP support is experimental and in alpha stage.
- Teams looking for drag-and-drop UI components, as HaishinKit provides low-level streaming APIs that require custom UI implementation and configuration.
Pros & Cons
Pros
With over 10 years of development, 2,778 commits, and 163 releases, HaishinKit offers a battle-tested and reliable foundation for live streaming on Apple devices.
Supports industry-standard RTMP and SRT for publishing and playback, with experimental WHEP/WHIP for modern web streaming, catering to diverse broadcasting needs.
Leverages Apple's multitasking APIs to enable simultaneous camera use with other apps, ideal for advanced streaming scenarios on iPad without conflicts.
Allows broadcasting live streams to multiple services at once, with tools to verify raw video data for ensuring stream quality and reliability.
Designed with Strict Concurrency compliance, reducing race conditions and making code safer and more maintainable in contemporary Swift projects.
Cons
WHEP/WHIP support is experimental, so developers relying on these protocols for production apps may face instability and limited functionality.
SRT protocol is not available for Mac Catalyst, restricting cross-platform development on certain Apple hardware and complicating unified codebases.
The README admits known issues with Xcode integration and requires manual AVAudioSession and Info.plist configuration, adding to development overhead and potential debugging time.
Frequently Asked Questions
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