Site Update: HLS support

Published on , 455 words, 2 minutes to read

Hi blog readers! It's time for a regular update on stuff I've gained expertise in frantically googled and hacked together so I can put it in front of your faces.

I use YouTube as a video hosting service because it's largely predictable and it's the evil I know. I'm starting to try to reduce my dependencies on large centralized systems like YouTube and one of the ways I want to do this is by hosting my own video.

In a perfect world, I'd wait until AV1 is fully dominant and supported on all the browsers that you people use, but I want to start experimenting on this now. As such, I am using hls.js to allow me to use HTTP live streaming to embed video on my blog. You can see it on these talk pages:

And if you want a live demo, check it out here with footage of a random Splatoon 3 match that I've been using to benchmark various ffmpeg flags:

Want to watch this in your video player of choice? Take this:
https://cdn.xeiaso.net/file/christine-static/blog/hls-post/index.m3u8

As far as I know, the only issue with this is that it doesn't work on iOS Safari. I'm not sure why. I plan to get this fixed at some point, but for now this works enough to experiment with. I will be sure to upload my next talk video for my GoLab talk using this.

Here is the ffmpeg command I'm using if it helps you figure out what I'm doing wrong:

ffmpeg \
  -i ./source.mp4 \
  -profile:v baseline \
  -level 3.0 \
  -start_number 0 \
  -hls_time 10 \
  -hls_list_size 0 \
  -f hls \
  index.m3u8

I also have a Pixel 6A running GrapheneOS now and I plan to experiment with GrapheneOS as my next daily driver smartphone OS. I enjoy how spartan it is. Just look at the default homescreen:

It's beautiful. There's just nothing there. I love it so much. I'm working on a longer post where I write about my experiences with GrapheneOS and my thoughts on if I want to use it as a daily driver. It reminds me of simpler days where people competed to build ever more slimmed down Android roms for budget phones.

Moving off iOS is going to be very multifaceted and complicated.

Anyways, hope this is interesting! Be well.

Facts and circumstances may have changed since publication. Please contact me before jumping to conclusions if something seems wrong or unclear.

Tags: hls