Once you’ve deployed your videos, it’s always a good idea to check them for any errors and make sure they are valid. This is especially true if you are developing an iOS application that streams video as Apple can reject your app if there are any problems with your streams. For example, if your application streams video over a cellular network, you must provide a stream with a maximum bit rate of 192 kbps. If you don’t, you aren’t going to make it into the App Store.

We can use Apple’s mediastreamvalidator tool to validate our video streams. It checks that the playlist and the media segments conform to the HTTP Live Streaming specification and will report any problems it finds so we can fix them.

To check if a video stream is valid, call mediastreamvalidator with the URL of the playlist. If you run the following command, you should see something like this:

$ mediastreamvalidator http://hlsbook.net/wp-content/examples/sintel/sintel_index.m3u8

[...] Started root playlist download
[...] Started media playlist download
[...] All media files delivered and have end tag, stopping

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
http://hlsbook.net/wp-content/examples/sintel/sintel_index.m3u8
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Processed 7 out of 7 segments
Average segment duration: 10.000000
Total segment bitrates (all discontinuties): average: 867.51 kb/s, max: 1199.59 kb/s

Discontinuity: sequence: 0, parsed segment count: 7 of 7, duration: 70.000 sec, average: 867.51 kb/s, max: 1199.59 kb/s
Track ID: 1
Video Codec: avc1
Video profile: High
Video level: 3.1
Video resolution: 1024x436
Video average IDR interval: 3.646930, Standard deviation: 3.265633
Video frame rate: 24.000
Track ID: 2
Audio Codec: AAC-LC
Audio sample rate: 48000 Hz
Audio channel layout: Stereo (L R)

No problems to report here. In addition to validating the stream, it also reports information such as the average bit rate, segment duration, and resolution. You can use this information to also check that you’ve encoded your videos correctly.

The latest version (1.1) of mediastreamvalidator supports outputting the data to a file in JSON format. You can then pass this JSON file to another of Apple’s tools hlsreport, which will generate a nicely formatted summary for you in an HTML page. Let’s look at the commands we need to run to do this:

$ mediastreamvalidator -O validation.json \
       http://hlsbook.net/wp-content/examples/sintel/sintel_index.m3u8

$ hlsreport.py -o report.html validation.json

This time we run mediastreamvalidator with the -O option specifying the name of the file we want to write the data to. (I’ve omitted the output.) Next, we run hlsreport.py on the data to generate the HTML page. Here’s an example report showing the findings of the validation tool.

(Interestingly the report flags a number of issues that weren’t reported when only running the validation tool. This could be because it appears to be checking the results against the HLS Authoring Specification for Apple TV. Whatever the reason, probably best to run both just to be absolutely certain.)

So now you know how to validate your HLS video streams, you should have no problems getting your app into the App Store.