Does YouTube live streaming support HLS (HTTP Live Streaming)?

Question

I'm a newcomer. I know YouTube live streaming supports RTMP, but I cannot find HLS encoder settings. Does it support HLS? I want to broadcast an HLS streaming via YouTube.

Answer 1

Short answer: Yes

Long answer:

The official page says:

Mobile streaming: Live events will be automatically available on iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch & Android 4.0+ mobile devices via m.youtube.com.

This sounds a lot like a HLS fallback.

Using an iPad user-agent and sniffing network traffic I found the following request to a Google server:

HTTP GET

/api/manifest/hls_variant/sparams/gcr,id,ip,ipbits,itag,playlist_type,pmbypass,source,expire/source/yt_live_broadcast/[redacted]/index.m3u8?[redacted]

and response:

HTTP/1.1 200 OK Content-Type: application/vnd.apple.mpegurl

#EXTM3U
#EXT-X-STREAM-INF:BANDWIDTH=380059,CODECS="avc1.4d0015,mp4a.40.5",RESOLUTION=426x240,CLOSED-CAPTIONS=NONE
http://manifest.googlevideo.com/api/manifest/hls_playlist/id/ANM-dq5USTc.1/itag/92/source/yt_live_broadcast/ratebypass/yes/live/1/cmbypass/yes/gir/yes/dg_shard[..]

So yeah, I guess YouTube live supports HLS.

Answer 2

A liveStream object contains a cdn object with the ingestionType property. This String property is used to declare the method or protocol used to transmit the video stream.

The only supported transmission format at this time is rtmp. HLS is not supported at this time but is on YouTube's roadmap for supported upstream formats.

As of April 2016, YouTube has added DASH as a supported ingestion video format.