No video display when watching HLS streams in browsers

[Tim Müller]

On Mon, 2017-02-06 at 17:56 +0800, Chien-Ming Cheng wrote:

Hi,

> I simply converted a media file (container: Quicktime, audio: MPEG-4
> AAC, video: H.264) to HLS stream as follows.
> 
> gst-launch-1.0 filesrc location=media.mp4 ! qtdemux name=demux !
> queue2 ! h264parse disable-passthrough=true ! mpegtsmux name=mux !
> hlssink max-files=0 playlist-length=0 demux. ! queue2 ! aacparse !
> mux.
> 
> I can watch the HLS stream via the playlist.m3u8 by using media
> players such as ffplay and vlc.
> 
> Then I created a web page which includes videojs-contrib-hls to play
> the playlist.m3u8. However, only audio can be played (no video
> display) when watching the HLS stream via http://address/index.html
> in browsers such as Chrome and Safari. On the other hand, both audio
> and video are fine via the same web page when replacing the HLS
> playlist and segment files with that generated by ffplay program.
> 
> I have tested GStreamer 1.6.x, 1.9.x, and the latest 1.10.3. All have
> the same result.
> 
> Does anyone know how to watch HLS streams generated by GStreamer in
> browsers? Did I make any mistakes (for example, the wrong GStreamer
> pipeline)?

I suspect the problem is missing AU delimiters. They don't exist in the
mp4 h264 stream, and h264parse doesn't insert them either [0]. If you
use an encoder it will depend on your encoder whether they get inserted
by default or not. x264enc should insert them by default these days.

Apple devices dont't like HLS streams without AU delimiters very much
if I remember correctly.

Cheers
 -Tim

[0] see https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=736213 for a patch
which might help

-- 
Tim Müller, Centricular Ltd - http://www.centricular.com