Hls video streaming on iOS/Safari

Question

I am trying to stream hls on safari iOS with Aframe that has three.js under the hood. But the video shows a black screen with just the audio playing. The video src is of type .m3u8. I tried to read through a lot of related posts but none seem to have a proper solution. Is it some kind of a wishful thinking getting HLS & WebGL to play on iOS? If not, can some one please help me with a solution.

A couple of discussions on the issues that are available on github:

• HLS m3u8 video streaming

• HLS on Safari

Wernher

Which mime-types are used by the web server and which codecs are used by the video fragments? It's odd that apple would not support a system they developed themselves. – Calloway

Answer 1

To your question:

Is it some kind of a wishful thinking getting HLS & WebGL to play on iOS?

Yes, wishful thinking :-) The problem/issue/bug is with Apple, not any library. No matter what the JS library, A-Frame, Three, etc, this will always be an issue on any browser in iOS (all browsers on iOS are basically wrappers for Safari), and OSX Safari.

The issue is this (from my understanding):

1. At some point in the history of WebGL, there were restrictions on cross-origin content (videos, images, etc). I can't find a source for this, but I remember reading it somewhere, so this might not be 100% accurate.
2. Recently (a couple years ago? 2015?) all major browsers came to the conclusion that cross-origin media for use in WebGL was safe. Except Apple/Safari.
3. For most browsers, the crossorigin attribute on a <video> element could signal that this content came from another source. In Safari, for whatever reason, this attribute is ignored or not implemented. In fact, it looks like WebKit, which Safari is based on, fixed this as far back as 2015, but Apple still does not implement it. Even Apple refuses to comment on any progress.

Possible workarounds:

1. WebGL on Safari works with progressive (not a stream like HLS/Dash) .mp4 videos. Check out any 360 video on Facebook (website, not app) in iOS/Safari, and you'll note the source is an .mp4.
2. Use HLS (or Dash), but play the video flat, without WebGL. Check out any 360 video on YouTube (website, not app), and I think they are using HLS or Dash, but the point is they stream the video, whereas Facebook doesn't.

Here's a good starting point to the real issue: link.

Here's another detailed thread: link.

Crystalcrystalline

The supplied links talk about CORS being the issue, would it still be an issue if you stream the videos from the same webserver the hls player is hosted on? – Calloway

That might work. I haven't worked with this technology in a while, but our videos were huge and hosted behind a CDN, so even proxying the stream caused issues. It might work locally, though. – Crystalcrystalline

Answer 2

https://github.com/video-dev/hls.js#compatibility

Please note: iOS Safari "Mobile" does not support the MediaSource API. Safari browsers have however built-in HLS support through the plain video "tag" source URL. See the example above (Getting Started) to run appropriate feature detection and choose between using Hls.js or natively built-in HLS support.

When a platform has neither MediaSource nor native HLS support, you will not be able to play HLS.

<script src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/hls.js@latest"></script>
<!-- Or if you want a more recent canary version -->
<!-- <script src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/hls.js@canary"></script> -->
<video id="video"></video>
<script>
  var video = document.getElementById('video');
  if (Hls.isSupported()) {
    var hls = new Hls();
    hls.loadSource('https://video-dev.github.io/streams/x36xhzz/x36xhzz.m3u8');
    hls.attachMedia(video);
    hls.on(Hls.Events.MANIFEST_PARSED, function() {
      video.play();
    });
  }
  // hls.js is not supported on platforms that do not have Media Source Extensions (MSE) enabled.
  // When the browser has built-in HLS support (check using `canPlayType`), we can provide an HLS manifest (i.e. .m3u8 URL) directly to the video element through the `src` property.
  // This is using the built-in support of the plain video element, without using hls.js.
  // Note: it would be more normal to wait on the 'canplay' event below however on Safari (where you are most likely to find built-in HLS support) the video.src URL must be on the user-driven
  // white-list before a 'canplay' event will be emitted; the last video event that can be reliably listened-for when the URL is not on the white-list is 'loadedmetadata'.
  else if (video.canPlayType('application/vnd.apple.mpegurl')) {
    video.src = 'https://video-dev.github.io/streams/x36xhzz/x36xhzz.m3u8';
    video.addEventListener('loadedmetadata', function() {
      video.play();
    });
  }
</script>

Rhondarhondda

Thanks a lot for your answer. For anyone coming here, I can confirm that it still works as of 2023, and this is the recommended way to handle M3U8 streams with Safari iOS (only!) – Shady