CODEWITHSUNDEEP
androidhttp-live-streaming
Rolf K
Rolf K

Reputation: 83

Some HLS streams on some android devices only play audio without video

My problem is that we have HLS Streams encoded by Amazon and hosted on Cloudfront that won't play on all devices.

Weird thing is that the One Plus X does play some HLS streams, like the ones found here: https://www.jwplayer.com/html5/hls/

Also on this site https://developer.apple.com/streaming/examples/ the One Plus X does play the stream on the left (suitable for iOS 4.3 and higher) but does not play the stream in the middle (suitable for iOS 5.0 and higher). The Nexus 6 plays both of those two.

So I'm thinking that somehow we have encoded/deployed our HLS streams with settings compatible for iOS 5.0 while what I'd want is a stream format like the one compatible for iOS 4.3. Unfortunately, I cannot find any info to what HLS settings I'd have to change to make my streams playable on more devices. Or what the big differences between these two Apple HLS streams are and what specific settings make the stream in the middle not playable on some devices.

Right now I'm even not sure if it's codec related, m3u8-meta-data related, or something entirely differnt.

I cannot publish our videos at the moment but am hoping that the Apple test streams might suffice, as they're displaying the same behaviour as our streams.

Any info would be appreciated!

Edit: we will test our streams with more devices and might be able to provide more info soon

Upvotes: 0

Views: 1144

Answers (1)

Rolf K
Rolf K

Reputation: 83

Our problem was the order of the streams in the playlist.

We had the audio-only stream at the top of the playlist, which made some devices play audio-only for the whole clip. Moving audio-only to the bottom fixed this for these devices.

Sadly, I haven't found any other information about this. In most examples I saw, the audio-only option was also at the bottom of the list, but without explanation. Since I thought that the playlist should have the stream with the least bitrate at the top, this is still a bit confusing for me and I would appreciate some explanation/documentation for this.

Upvotes: 1

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