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Comment by pjc50 | Hacker News Reader

Good top-level summary of an extremely complicated subject.

The containers diagram is surprising since the arrow means "derived from" - the earlier formats are at the top, I initially thought the arrow was in the wrong direction. Containers are kind of a nightmare since there is a lot of hidden knowledge you need. Many of the tools will let you put any video in any container, but only certain combinations actually work properly across the various devices and operating systems you will actually need to use. It's easiest to stick to "H264 + AAC in an MPEG4 container".

HLS is a horrible hack that also has the side effect of making it harder to download and store videos.

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While HLS isn't the cleanest protocol (Yay for extensions of the M3U playlist format...), it's actually really good at what it's designed to do - provide reliable video streaming while using HTTP/S over variable networks.

Ultimately, HLS isn't designed for downloading and storing videos, it's designed for streaming.

Came to say this exact thing. HLS and it's fancy brother LLHLS aren't storage formats like MP4/FLV are. I think of HLS as a playback format: I'd play a Playlist when watching a VOD/livestream but I'd probably save it as an MP4.

>making it harder to download and store videos.

And all of the studios cheered! /s

But in reality, it hasn't, right? There are so many tools available that will download a video as a single file for you that's not even an issue. You should try looking for the Wizard with that strawman.

There's a difference between not being designed for something, and being designed to prevent something. HLS isn't designed to prevent saving, it's just optimised for streaming.

The GP stated that hls makes it harder to download and store videos which is mostly a dubious claim, but even if it were true, in most cases where it’s used this is (if only hypothetically) a benefit since major stream providers generally don’t want their streams stored. The reply sounds appropriate.

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