TCP

A rigorous per-stage latency benchmark across H.264, H.265, and AV1 hardware codecs on NVIDIA Jetson Orin (JetPack 6), measuring encode, wire, and decode separately at FHD and HD resolutions. AV1 wins end-to-end at 104 ms FHD / 86 ms HD. H.264 is the worst choice despite being the oldest: its nvv4l2decoder holds ~4 frames in an internal DPB buffer, adding 130–170 ms of hidden latency. Wire latency is governed by parse-element lookahead, not byte volume. Clock sync achieves ±234 µs via chrony. Full pipeline source, CSVs, and reproduction steps included.

After O3DE’s 18 ms frame-graph readback made 30 FPS streaming impossible, we tried Godot. It got us there — eventually. This is the full path from 105 FPS on nothing to 50 FPS per camera with three live RTP streams, including every wrong turn and every underdocumented Godot behavior we hit on the way.

A three-day odyssey connecting PX4 flight controller to a GPU-rendered Unity drone simulation running headless inside Docker — through licensing labyrinths, shader abysses, coordinate system riddles, native library dragons, and a TCP protocol twist ending nobody expected.