Delivering Videos with Apple HLS

Apple HTTP Live Streaming (HLS) is a protocol implemented by Apple for delivering video to Apple mobile devices including the iPhone, iPad, or iPod Touch. This protocol breaks the video into a sequence of small file downloads, each download loading one short chunk of the video using HTTP. The iTunes App Store rules call for the use of Apple HLS for long form video content (greater than 5 Mb or 10 minutes).

Note that Apple HLS has nothing to do with live video. For information about our live video capabilities see Delivering Live Video.

Creating Apple HLS renditions

Video Cloud supports Apple HLS as a video encoding option, along with H.264 (MP4) and VP6 (FLV). You can configure your account to create one or more Apple HLS renditions, along with any H.264 or VP6 renditions you want to create, when you upload a video to Video Cloud. This feature is available only to Video Cloud Pro and Enterprise publishers, since it requires the custom transcode settings feature.

To configure an Apple HLS rendition, edit your transcode settings. Under Account Settings > Transcode Settings > Multiple Renditions, add one or more renditions with the Video Container setting set to M2TS. Since Apple HLS renditions will be played back only on Apple iOS devices, in nearly all cases you will also want to maintain a full range of H.264 / MP4 renditions for delivery to desktop and mobile web applications. For more information, see Setting your transcode options and Encoding for Mobile Video.

Once you have set your transcode settings to include one or more Apple HLS renditions, then every time you upload a video, whether you use the Media module, FTP batch provisioning, or the Media API, the video will include Apple HLS renditions along with the other multi-bitrate renditions that are created. 

Your existing video content will not automatically have Apple HLS renditions; to create Apple HLS renditions for your existing videos, you need to re-encode them. See Re-encoding Existing Videos.

Playing Apple HLS renditions

Video Cloud supports Apple HLS playback on Apple iOS devices. Video Cloud smart players will automatically detect any available Apple HLS renditions.

Any native apps you create for Apple devices using the Video Cloud App SDK for iOS can access and play back your Apple HLS renditions. You can also access your Apple HLS renditions using the Media API, by setting the media_delivery argument to http_ios and including the FLVURL property in the Video objects you retrieve with the Media API, as described in Accessing Video Content with the Media API.

Video Cloud also offers Apple HLS encryption, which lets you send encrypted video over HTTP for playback on devices running iOS including, the iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch. See Protecting Videos on iOS Devices with HLS Encryption for details.