HLS Playback

The BBC’s HLS streams may either contain Media Segments formatted as MPEG-2 Transport Stream or a Packed Audio stream, as described in RFC 8216. Clients must accept either format if they wish to ensure compatibility with all current and future HLS streams.

The BBC uses HLS protocol version 2 in its manifests. Clients are required to support protocol version 2 or higher in order to successfully play BBC HLS streams.

HLS manifests may contain absolute URLs (where the full URL is specified, including protocol and domain name), or relative URLs (where the URL is relative to the URL used to obtain the top-level HLS manifest). Clients must accept either format if they wish to ensure compatibility with all current and future HLS streams. Redirect URLs should be processed in accordance with RFC 3986. Particular note should be made of section 5.1.3, which states:

5.1.3 Base URI from the Retrieval URI

If no base URI is embedded and the representation is not encapsulated
within some other entity, then, if a URI was used to retrieve the
representation, that URI shall be considered the base URI.  Note that
if the retrieval was the result of a redirected request, the last URI
used (i.e., the URI that resulted in the actual retrieval of the
representation) is the base URI.