6 MOQ Players You Need To Know About: Pros and Cons
Red5 is a US-based software development company specializing in real-time video streaming solutions for developers, startups, and enterprises. Its core products include the open-source Red5 Media Server, Red5 Pro (server software designed for ultra-low latency streaming at scale), Red5 Cloud (a fully managed, globally distributed streaming PaaS solution), and Red5 SDKs (developer tools for building interactive streaming applications). Red5 serves industries such as Media & Entertainment, Government & Public Safety, Video Surveillance, Interactive Live Shopping, eSports and Gaming, Video Conferencing & Webinar, E-learning, Telemedicine, Online Auction & Bidding, Metaverse AR/VR/XR, enabling interactive real-time video, audio, and data streaming at scale across platforms.
MOQ is moving fast, but one question keeps coming up from developers and product teams: what can you actually use today to play MOQ streams in a browser? We pulled together a quick comparison guide of the MOQ player implementations we are aware of right now. The goal is to give you a starting point, not a final recommendation. If you are new to this topic, start by reading “What is MOQ?”.
A quick note on a term you will see below: “catalog.” In MOQ land, a catalog is metadata that describes available tracks (codec, bitrate, audio layout, and other fields), so an app can select video/audio tracks and support things like stream selection and switching.
6 MOQ Players implementations we tracked so far
Comparison Table: Players Compatible With the MOQ Streaming Protocol.
1. Moq-js by Luke Curley (MOQ lite)
URL: https://github.com/moq-dev/moq/tree/main/js
Luke Curley is very responsive and helpful to the community.
Cloudflare appears to be focusing on moq-js for their implementation.
Apache 2.0 and MIT licensing makes it interesting as a foundation.
Does not support Fetch, and likely never will impacting DVR style scrubbing use cases.
Some fragmentation: Cloudflare has branched and maintains separate implementations for the IETF spec and MOQ lite.
2. MOQtail by Professor Ali C. Begen and his students (Draft 14)
URL: https://github.com/moqtail/moqtail
No large company behind it today (Özyeğin University based). Although I should note that they have received significant sponsorships from companies like Akamai.
More links: https://moqtail.dev/
3. Shaka Player by Álvaro Velad Galván and Wojciech Tyczyński (Draft 14)
URL: https://github.com/shaka-project/shaka-player/commit/ef361ed03995b7591b4aa3210c4f9aed7e4fec67
Very new and still experimental for MOQ related work (recently merged).
There seems to be little known about the player from the general MOQ community. For example, most of the folks on the player working group didn’t know about their new MOQ support.
More links: https://shaka-project.github.io/shaka-player/
4. Moq-encoder-player by Meta (Draft 14)
URL: https://github.com/facebookexperimental/moq-encoder-player
Pros:
Red5 has been contributing to this project, and Jordi Cenzano has been great to work with and responsive.
Castlabs implemented DRM support on this player (older fork).
Large corporation behind the implementation meaning it’s likely to get support and attention over the long run.
MIT licensing makes it interesting as a foundation.
Cons:
No catalog track support today.
Implementation is still fairly basic so far.
5. Player Web X by Bitmovin (draft not disclosed publicly)
URL: https://bitmovin.com/player-web-x/
Pros:
Not much known yet, since it requires requesting a demo.
Bitmovin are part of the OpenMOQ consortium and very likely to incorporate the work we do there into their own player.
Nice to have a commercial offering in the list which would come with extensive support.
Also supports multiple other protocols and analytics.
Cons:
Closed source implementation.
Will cost money.
Licensing type is not disclosed publicly.
More links: https://bitmovin.com/blog/sub-second-st
6. WARP Player by Eyevinn Technology (Draft 14)
URL: https://github.com/Eyevinn/warp-player
Pros:
- MIT licensed open source.
Cons:
No large company behind it yet, but it could be promising.
Very early.
No large community adoption as of yet.
It is a very new project, and our team has not had time to look into it yet.
So what should you choose?
Right now, it is still early. If you want something you can study and hack on today, the open source options above are the best place to start. If you need a polished commercial offering, the closed source path offered by Bitmovin may make sense, but it comes with the usual tradeoffs.
Where we are headed next
At Red5, we are kicking off work with the OpenMOQT community on an OpenMOQT Player Initiative. The plan is to focus on web first, then move to native Android and iOS. We are also aiming to have something meaningful to show around NAB 2026. We are in the process of evaluating the open source options to figure out what makes sense to build from, or looking at whether it makes sense to start our own from scratch. In the meantime with our own Red5 implementation, we’ve been ensuring compatibility with Luke’s MOQ Lite player and the Meta implementation. Depending on the speed of the OpenMOQ working group, we may initially roll out one of these in our player/HTML5 SDK until the OpenMOQ version is ready for prime time.
If you know of other MOQ players, writeups, or press links we should add to this list, please mention them in the comments on this post. This space is moving quickly, and the best way to keep up is to participate in the very active MOQ community. I hope what I’ve listed here helps.
Wondering how MOQ compares to WebRTC? Read our previous blog, “MOQ vs WebRTC.”
