About: HTTP Live Streaming (known as HLS) is an HTTP-based adaptive bitrate streaming protocol. Whereby video and audio data is sent via short media segment files with a specified duration. An index file (or playlist) provides an ordered list of the manifest URLs of the segments and specifies the order and timing in which to play the segments. It is saved in an M3U8 format. The segments are requested or sent in sequences.
Real-time connectivity metrics
Why do monitoring graphs look different for HLS than other protocols?
As the segments are arriving at the input or destination in intervals, the bitrate graph will show spikes instead of constant high bars. For HLS a graph with spikes is not an indicator for an unstable connection.
Qualities
HLS pull inputs always select the stream with the highest quality for ingesting.
HLS pull resource locations provide as many qualities as configured in a transcoded output.