About

This service tests the validity of an HTTP Live Streaming (HLS) feed, checking to see that it complies with the guidelines and recommendations specified in the HLS specification and the HLS authoring guidelines for Apple devices. Why is this important? If your HLS playlists conform to the standards and recommendations then you can be more confident that your video streams will play correctly on the wide range of different video players, devices and platforms that are available. In addition, if you're submitting an app to Apple's App Store, they check your video streams for compliance with their recommendations and if they don't comply, your app may be rejected!

The service is currently in beta and because of this there are currently some limitations in place. For example, the service will only analyze an HLS playlist for a maximum of 1 minute. If you have a variant playlist with multiple streams, the full analysis may not complete in time, in which case the test coverage won't necessarily be 100%. The service also doesn't currently check every single recommendation in both the RFC and the authoring guidelines. However, it does cover enough for now for it to be useful and the plan is to add more validation checks and features over time to make the analysis more complete. Only video and audio streams are checked.

HLS Report was created by Simon Buckle, a software developer and author of the book HTTP Live Streaming: A Practical Guide. If you have any feedback or requests for features then send me an email. I'd love to hear your thoughts about how to make the service better.