Wowza Community

HLS protocol selection in playlist

Hi,

we are still looking for a solution so that we can serve HLS playlists with full urls in them, and the right protocol (http vs https). As far I can see, it is currently not possible to do this. I think it is a highly needed feature, due to the fact that a lot of site are moving to SSL, and therefore, wants the HLS streams also through SSL. But older legacy users would still use the HTTP protocol. So I would like to request the following.

  1. Either make the check if http or https is needed based on the initial request of the player. So player requests first playlist through SSL, the m3u8 will contain full path with https:// because of the initial request

  2. Add more options, but I think that is a bit of overkill

  3. Make the options for setting the protocol properties available in the VHost settings.

In all cases we have the setting in the Application.xml of both VoD and Live application which will produce full urls in the m3u8 playlists and redirects.

<Property>
  <Name>cupertinoRelativePlaylistPlaylists</Name>
  <Value>false</Value>
  <Type>Boolean</Type>
</Property>

Point 1:

It is possible to specify the protocol when using absolute paths.

<Property>
  <Name>cupertinoPlaylistHostProtocol</Name>
  <Value>https://</Value>
</Property>

But this will produce always https:// urls, where it is not always needed or wanted. So I would suggest, that when this last option not is set, Wowza will look at the initial request and use that protocol for the rest of the actions and redirects.

Or make the option like

<Property>
  <Name>cupertinoPlaylistHostProtocol</Name>
  <Value>${com.wowza.wms.HostPort.requested}</Value>
</Property>

Where ${com.wowza.wms.HostPort.requested} is telling Wowza to use http if the initial request was http and https of the initial request was https.

  1. Somehow add more options to control this behaviour. But that could be overkill

  2. Make the above options also configurable in the VHost.xml file. Because it is possible to have multiple VHosts. So then I would specify two VHosts. One on port 80 and one on port 443. So the one on 443 should then provide https urls and port 80 only http. If we could add HTTPStreamer properties in the VHost.xml config, then we can split up the hosts, and use there own version of the setting cupertinoPlaylistHostProtocol. This makes sense in my opinion, due to the fact, that I here specify if I want to use SSL. And therefore I expect this setting also here, because it is related to VHost settings.

Now these are ignored in the VHost configuration.

So I would ask Wowza if there are plans to make this a bit more flexible. I would like prefer option 1. Either automatic, or through a setting. And I think there are more people getting this issue because we are all moving from HTTP to HTTPS sites.

Kind regards

Joshua

Hi Joshua,

Thank you for your feedback. I’ll make sure to forward it to our Engineering team for consideration in a future release, although I can’t provide a timeframe as to when it would be deployed.

Michelle

Small addition: Currently Wowza is using the hostname that is in the request to generate the full url. So there is already some code that does manipulate the full url based on the host header and port number. So extend that code that the protocol in the playlist is also based on the initial request.

Hi Joshua,

Thank you for your feedback. I’ll make sure to forward it to our Engineering team for consideration in a future release, although I can’t provide a timeframe as to when it would be deployed.

Michelle

Is this feature implemented? If yes how we can implement this?