What is a HLS?
HLS stands for HTTP Live Streaming and it is a media protocol to deliver video and audio through over the internet. With HLS, it becomes easier to scale out horizontally as the protocol uses standard HTTP servers to deliver the audio files.
Difference with traditional media servers
Traditional media servers would serve files over a connection when the client connects to it. Usually there would be a limit to the number of clients that can connect to a single server to retrieve audio files. With traditional media servers, it becomes quite difficult to scale out as we would need to then horizontally scale each server out in order to accommodate more users. As clients would need to connect to the server to get the audio, we would not be able to make use of CDNs and other technology to help us handle more load.
How does HLS come into play?
HLS works by delivering several audio files that is about 12 seconds long using the standard HTTP protocol. As we use standard HTTP in the background, we can then make use of CDN’s to reduce the load on our servers.
How HLS works?
The HLS protocol works as follows:
- A stream URL is provided for a client to consume. This stream URL would be the master playlist that a client should use to retrieve a list of media playlists.
To be continued..