Should there be a concept of media stream?

[huitema]

Most real-time media applications have a concept of "media stream", in which a client subscribes to the stream of data coming from a specific source. The QUICR protocol does not follow that pattern -- or at least the PUBLISH function does not. PUBLISH is defined as:

   PUBLISH {
     ORIGIN            (String)
     NAME              (Number128)
     FLAGS             (Byte)
     FRAGMENT_ID       (Number16)
     BESTBEFORE        (Number64)
     TIMESTAMP         (Number64)
     PAYLOAD           (ByteArray)
   }

This assumes that each media frame sent between source and receiver is decorated with an Origin and a Name. That seems rather wasteful. The natural mapping to QUIC would be at the "media stream" level, in which:

• a consumer subscribes to a "media stream", defined by ORIGIN, NAME, and probably a starting point,
• if the stream is available, the publisher provides a short term identifier, e.g., "stream ID", which could be the identifier of a QUIC stream, or possibly an identifier of a datagram stream if we assume all datagrams start with an integer encoded stream ID.
• Each stream publishes a succession of objects for which there is no need to repeat Origin and Name.

[TimEvens]

Looks like draft 01 changed to remove PUBLISH message and takes into account this issue. Although that change introduced other issues, I recommend we close this one out for now. New issues exist for the updated 01 changes. @huitema , please close unless you are still working on this one.