ios play HLS - only lowest bitrate available

Question

i'm trying to play HLS streamed by IIS in different bitrates on ipad (ios 6), encoded with ffmpeg. i can see that only the lowest bitrate (600k) is being played by the native player: to play it i'm just opening the main index file (.m3u8) on Safari.

is there a way to get some logs from the player to understand why this happens? tried with the Safari Developer tools but didn't get to much info from it

thanks

Answer 1

I would start by force requesting a child manifest. For example, you might have the following ABR renditions available:

stream.m3u8
stream_600.m3u8
stream_800.m3u8
stream_1200.m3u8
stream_1600.m3u8

In the latest Safari (OSX and iOS) you can simply request the child manifests by changing your playback URL. You're probably requesting something like http://streamingserver.com/stream.m3u8 (master manifest) and you could just modify that to http://streamingserver.com/stream_1200.m3u8 (child manifest)

I would also try taking a look at the master manifest to ensure that the other bitrates are available. You can use a tool like wget or cURL to grab it from the master URL.