I have a stream to my national broadcast station (all free and paid for by my income tax) that uses something I believe is called a variant stream. So I have a url to a .m3u8 playlist that has a syntax kind of like this
EXTM3U
#EXT-X-VERSION:3
#EXT-X-STREAM-INF:PROGRAM-ID=1,BANDWIDTH=620400,CODECS="avc1.4d0015,mp4a.40.2",RESOLUTION=426x240
index/stream1.m3u8
#EXT-X-STREAM-INF:PROGRAM-ID=1,BANDWIDTH=950400,CODECS="avc1.77.30,mp4a.40.2",RESOLUTION=640x360
index/stream2.m3u8
#EXT-X-STREAM-INF:PROGRAM-ID=1,BANDWIDTH=1390400,CODECS="avc1.77.30,mp4a.40.2",RESOLUTION=852x480
index/stream3.m3u8
#EXT-X-STREAM-INF:PROGRAM-ID=1,BANDWIDTH=2710400,CODECS="avc1.4d001f,mp4a.40.2",RESOLUTION=1280x720
index/stream4.m3u8
Using something called live adaptive I think they choose one of those stream[1-4] .m3u8 playlists based on available bandwidth. Those playlists in turn do have the more familiar syntax
#EXTM3U
#EXT-X-VERSION:3
#EXT-X-TARGETDURATION:9
#EXT-X-MEDIA-SEQUENCE:205887
#EXTINF:9.000,
stream1_205887.ts
#EXTINF:9.000,
stream1_205888.ts
#EXTINF:9.000,
stream1_205889.ts
// same sequence up to 206654.ts
What is going on here i’m not sure, but seems they are 9 second streams, which might be used while reevaluating which bandwidth to use or something.
Question is, can this be useful at all to IPTV Simple client. Linking straight to the top level playlist resulted in me seeing 3 channels (not 4 as I assumed because 4 different stream qualities) but they had strange names with some numbers and none of them worked.
Is there any way I can get this to work so this becomes 1 channel, and could I do it so this can live in a playlist with other channels?