Time Travel in MOQ Conferencing

In this demonstration, we present a real-time videoconferencing application built on the MOQtail open-source MOQ Transport (MOQT) protocol library. Competing with WebRTC on end-to-end latency (targeting around 100 ms with a small jitter buffer), the application uniquely offers a time-travel feature: participants can instantly rewind and play another participant's last X seconds (configurable) of content to recover context missed due to late arrivals or interruptions, all while the live meeting continues uninterrupted. This capability is achieved via a single transport in which the relay caches recent media objects for on-demand retrieval. Technically, our design leverages reliable QUIC streams to manage delivery, implementing a dynamic strategy that prioritizes low latency over perfect reliability, thereby ensuring real-time performance. This demonstration, which is released as open-source code, highlights MOQT's potential to unify real-time communications with seamless media time-shifting in a single, robust protocol stack.