HLS Adaptive Bitrate Audio Streaming Not Working
I am the engineer for a radio station that streams audio using the HLS (M3U8) format. This stream was added several years ago to accommodate Apple's iTunes and HomePod players; it uses adaptive bit rates of 64 kb/s HE-AAC and 256 kb/s AAC.
It's been a while since I last tried, but I recently noticed that VLC, v3.0.20, can no longer play the stream(s). We're streaming using 10 second file chunks. VLC will play the first second of audio, not even a full chunk, and then hang.
When we first deployed the stream several years ago, I tested using VLC and it worked... perhaps not perfectly, but at least it kept playing. I found an old laptop I had in storage that has VLC v3.0.4 loaded. It plays the first chunk, pauses for a brief moment as it transitions to the next chunk, then plays normally after that (i.e., it does not do a seamless transition between the low and high speed file chunks).
As an experiment with v3.0.20, I directed VLC to stream only the underlying low or high bitrate file chunks, and it worked fine.
In another experiment, I set up an off-line encoder and chose the same codec (AAC) for both the lower and higher bitrates; VLC still would hang after playing the first second of audio, so this would not appear to be a change of codec issue.
I've attached a sample debug files from both the 3.0.4 and 3.0.20 versions for comparison. I wasn't certain how much value there'd be in looking at the debug log from the old code that has probably changed quite a bit, but it is attached, just in case.
The URL for the stream is: https://kclustream.callutheran.edu:8443/kcluhls.m3u8
If you want to stream just the low or high bitrate streams, they can be found at: https://kclustream.callutheran.edu:8443/kcluhls-64000.m3u8 https://kclustream.callutheran.edu:8443/kcluhls-256000.m3u8
I should mention that the same problem also exists using VLC for Android. In the past, it worked too, but not any longer. Firefox for Android and Chrome (for Android) both work fine.