Android HLS video mime type

Question

I would like to fire an Intent to play a HLS (HTTP Live Stream) video.

What should I put in the type field to fire just the video players that support HLS?

I tried unsuccessfully the following:

video/m3u

video/m3u8

video/hls

application/x-mpegURL

vnd.apple.mpegURL

video/MP2T

application/vnd.apple.mpegurl

Ideas please...

Answer 1

You should put the Content-Type type specified in the RFC: application/vnd.apple.mpegurl. See section 3.1 of http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-pantos-http-live-streaming-08

Android support for HLS is extremely poor. You will need some third party software on many devices, especially for versions less than 3. Google doesn't seem to care, or at least not to regression test.

Answer 2

Android code (ICS, JB) looks at the URL to determine player selection! If the URL contains the keyword m3u8, then and only then, will it play HLS. This is obviously a bug in Android.

Answer 3

The problem

When I used

<video id="player"
       src="http://hlsserver.example/auth/and/get/hls?authkey=42" 
       controls>
</video>

it failed with videoElement.error == error.MEDIA_ERR_SRC_NOT_SUPPORTED [1] on Chrome 40, even though Chrome requested the src URL three times as seen in tcpdump. This is the response from the server:

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Content-Type: application/vnd.apple.mpegurl
[...]

#EXTM3U
#EXT-X-VERSION:3
#EXT-X-MEDIA:TYPE=SUBTITLES,GROUP-ID="subs",NAME="Swedish",AUTOSELECT=YES,DEFAULT=YES,URI="blah",LANGUAGE="swe"
#EXT-X-STREAM-INF:PROGRAM-ID=1,BANDWIDTH=500000,SUBTITLES="subs"
/stream-proxy/blah1
#EXT-X-STREAM-INF:PROGRAM-ID=1,BANDWIDTH=700000,SUBTITLES="subs"
/stream-proxy/blah2
#EXT-X-STREAM-INF:PROGRAM-ID=1,BANDWIDTH=1000000,SUBTITLES="subs"
/stream-proxy/blah3

Footnotes

1. MEDIA_ERR_SRC_NOT_SUPPORTED has a value of 4.

The solution

It seems like thoma.ing's answer is correct for Chrome 40 on Android 4.4.4 at least:

Android code (ICS, JB) looks at the URL to determine player selection! If the URL contains the keyword m3u8, then and only then, will it play HLS. This is obviously a bug in Android.

When I changed the video src URL to include the m3u8 keyword it started working perfectly fine on Chrome.

<video id="player"
       src="http://hlsserver.example/auth/and/get/hls?authkey=42&m3u8=yes"
       controls>
</video>

Answer 4

Having the same issue but "audio/x-mpegURL" seems to work as is what the sample HLS stream on Apples site uses http://devimages.apple.com/iphone/samples/bipbop/gear1/prog_index.m3u8 - testing on a Galaxy Nexus BTW.

Bit confusing though hence why I'm looking around.