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Comment by harshreality | Hacker News Reader

HLS (http live streaming, .m3u8 rotating playlists of chunks of video) isn't supported by desktop browsers except for Safari. That seems to be preventing live streaming sites from migrating away from flash. Notably, NASA's videos of the Orion mission were on flash on desktop, but their mobile site (mobile browsers—iOS, and Android since Honeycomb—support HLS) wasn't using flash.

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The webm video container live-streams fantastically well. It's just the MP4 container that is broken and doesn't live-stream.

Note that if you put H264 in an MPEG2-TS container that it will stream fine as well, but unfortunately that's not supported by browsers. (It also is inefficient, which makes it a poor choice.)

There is fragmented MP4, (usually called fMP4), which is a single MP4 file with multiple fragments inside. The last time I looked this wasn't supported by any browser, but now it looks like there's been work to integrate it into chrome and firefox.

The reason that single-file live-streaming is useful is that you can point the video tag's SRC at a URL that just calls popen on an FFMPEG process and transcode video on the fly, or even create new content immediately.

GP is talking about adaptive streaming with HLS. What you're discussing works only if all your clients have the same bandwidth.

HLS is on the way out. (Was it ever really in?) All the big video sites are implementing DASH.

I doubt this highly. And if they are moving to DASH it is implemented by Flash.

the recent "steam broadcasting" (live video game streams served via steam's service)

uses DASH and is works with pure HTML5 (no flash needed)

Not in safari or iOS

Safari on Mac now supports MSE, on which there are multiple DASH implementations. Safari on iOS is behind, but it's not hard to guess where it's going.

According to Steam it works in the Steam Client, Google Chrome, and Safari: https://support.steampowered.com/kb_article.php?ref=6730-TOA...

If they just say 'Safari', it probably doesn't work on iOS at the moment. But it should work on your Mac unless an extension/addon is interfering.

In order for DASH to work you need Media Source Extensions support. Firefox for example doesn't support them yet.

They're hidden behind an about:config flag - media.mediasource.enabled

The latest version of developer edition/aurora just enabled them by default, so version 36. They may be only ~12 weeks away from becoming default in the stable build.

Thanks, I didn't know that setting already made it into the stable build. Now I can watch Youtube in high resolution (and in VP9 with that!) without using Flash. Why is it still disabled though, there are some bugs left?

UPDATE: some remaining issues are listed here: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=778617

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