HTTP Live Streaming (HLS) is a media streaming protocol developed by Apple that allows you to send live or pre-recorded audio and video content over the internet. It is particularly important for delivering content to iOS devices, macOS, and other Apple environments. HLS works by breaking the overall stream into a sequence of small HTTP-based file downloads, each download loading one short chunk of an overall potentially unbounded transport stream. This article will guide you through the process of creating and serving HLS content on macOS.

Examples:

1. Setting Up the Environment:

   To create HLS streams, you need to have FFmpeg installed on your macOS. FFmpeg is a powerful multimedia framework that can decode, encode, transcode, mux, demux, stream, filter, and play almost anything that humans and machines have created.

   Install FFmpeg using Homebrew:

   /bin/bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/HEAD/install.sh)"
   brew install ffmpeg

2. Creating HLS Segments:

   Use FFmpeg to convert a video file into HLS format. The following command will take an input video file (input.mp4) and create HLS segments:

   ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -codec: copy -start_number 0 -hls_time 10 -hls_list_size 0 -f hls index.m3u8

   Explanation:

   • -i input.mp4: Specifies the input file.
   • -codec: copy: Copies the codec from the input file without re-encoding.
   • -start_number 0: Starts the segment numbering at 0.
   • -hls_time 10: Sets the duration of each segment to 10 seconds.
   • -hls_list_size 0: Includes all segments in the playlist.
   • -f hls index.m3u8: Specifies the output format and the name of the playlist file.

3. Serving HLS Content:

   To serve the HLS content, you need a web server. You can use the built-in Apache server on macOS.

   Enable Apache:

   sudo apachectl start

   Create a directory in the Apache document root to store the HLS files:

   sudo mkdir -p /Library/WebServer/Documents/hls
   sudo cp index.m3u8 /Library/WebServer/Documents/hls/
   sudo cp *.ts /Library/WebServer/Documents/hls/

   Ensure the permissions are correct:

   sudo chmod -R 755 /Library/WebServer/Documents/hls

   Access the HLS stream by navigating to http://localhost/hls/index.m3u8 in your web browser or media player that supports HLS.