HLS
HLS (also known as HTTP Live Streaming) is an HTTP-based adaptive bitrate streaming communications protocol developed by Apple Inc. The protocol is mainly widespread in audio and video services on PC and Apple's terminals. HLS breaks the overall stream into continuous small ts
files on the server, and accesses the ts
files in sequence via M3U8 index. The client only needs to continuously play the files obtained from the server in sequence, so as to realize the playback of audio and video.
HLS outperforms HTTP-FLV in the following aspects:
Supported natively on Apple's full range of products and also on Android system or PCs.
Supports HTTP/HTTPS transmission, effectively avoiding firewall blocks.
Higher performance.
However, HLS has the following disadvantages due to the transmission protocol.
Poor sync performance : The latency is often greater than 10s.
Requires high storage and cache performance due to sliced file transfer.
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