HLS Adaptive bitrate Recording in S3

[Harry]

Hi,
I have adaptive bitrate and hls streaming enabled, which generates 3 different quality versions of hls playback.
I also have record as MP4 and Enabled S3 Recordings turned on.

An issue arises when i have start and stop streaming to the same key multiple times.
In my S3 bucket, for MP4, every new stream has a suffix added and is saved. Example: (fOHnfTtvrNgb1664435682990.mp4, fOHnfTtvrNgb1664435682990_1.mp4)

However, for the HLS version no suffix is added and therefore the hls files are overwritten and im left with only the last stream.

How can i go about preventing this, and retaining all my different HLS streams. 

[Yash]

Hi @Harry
I hope you are doing well.

I think there is no property or flag to append the time stamp to the HLS (.ts) files, but the ts files can be appended to the same m3u8 file with the same stream Id.

To do so, edit and add the following hlsflag setting to the red5-web.properties file in the /usr/local/antmedia/webapps/app-name/WEB-INF/ folder.

settings.hlsflags=+append_list

After saving the changes, restart the server. 

Please make sure that your HLS playlist type setting is set to event. There is one more alternate solution to upload files to s3 bucket using s3 fuse. Please take a look at this stack overflow post. 

Regards,
Yash

[Harry]

Thanks @Yash.

If im correct, This 2 method, will end up with me having 1 long hls video, unlike the mp4 version which is split by start and stop.

So currently theres no way for me to have the hls version, like the mp4 version, without advanced configuration am i right?

[Harry]

And with the limitations, i wont be able to have a persistent stream key if i want to have separate M3U8 for VOD playback,
as i would have to delete and create a new broadcast for a separate m3u8 file.

[Yash]

@Harry
Yes, you are correct. There will be a single m3u8 file containing all of the .ts chunks. There is no other way to have a different m3u8 file for the same stream ID or to include a time stamp in HLS files at the moment.

A similar question/issue is raised by another user on Git Hub. I believe he is using a script to backup the same-day HLS files to subfolder. It might also help you, and you can comment on the issue to get assistance from this user.
https://github.com/ant-media/Ant-Media-Server/issues/4448

I hope it helps.