[Free] [Updated 2024] List of OTT HLS M3U8 test URLs

HLS (HTTP Live Streaming) M3U8 URLs for Testing

Introduction:

Video real time is an essential piece of the cutting edge web. It's all over: on PCs, TVs, cell phones, and even on wearables like VR sets. It needs to work perfectly on each gadget and system type, be it on moderate portable associations, WiFi, behind firewalls. HLS is developed by Apple Inc., which is HTTP based media streaming protocol. Apple's HTTP Live Streaming (HLS) was made precisely in view of these difficulties. 

Practically all cutting edge gadgets come blessed with present day equipment that is sufficiently quick to play video, so speedy and unwavering quality rise as the most serious issue. Why would that be? Before more than couple of years, the standard method of putting away and distributing video were UDP-based conventions like RTP. This demonstrated tricky from multiple points of view. Here are few of them- 

- You need a worker (daemon) administration to stream content. 

- Considering the global public over the internet, you will need a streaming daemon service running in different parts of the world to cater them.

- And most firewalls by-design permit just standard ports and system traffic types, such as http.

Why Legacy streaming system is floppy:

Efficiency is the biggest issue here. The actual size of the video data is getting high and consiquently increases the file size. Transferring files with big size is a challenge on its own and areas where the connectivity is poor or high bandwidth is not available, its difficult for the users to view such high bitrate, high resolution videos.So, we need a solution that would download the amount of video which is approximately the same which can be played. Other way would be to reduce the resolution as mentioned above but here the bandwidth is not completely utilised and its getting wasted. Here comes the role of Adaptive Bitrate Streaming 

As the name suggest, the media bitrate area calculated on the fly and used for rendering the media stream.

A special thing about HLS is that, the HLS packet can easily pass through firewalls or proxy servers as it is HTTP based request and not like UDP based protocol like RTP. Its an ABS (Adaptive Bitrate Streaming) protocol which uses m3u8 files to describe media streams which underneath uses HTTP hence the name HTTP Live Streaming.

The HLS is comprised of M3u8 PlayList which is plain text file format made to organize collections of MP3 files and Media files for various stream.

HTTP Live Streaming i.e. HLS is not open standard likewise most of the technology from Apple, thus it is difficult to find the content from the Open source Community.

Overall, if you see, the MPEG-DASH and HLS test streams OR the .m3u8 streams are very important for you to test your solutions. These streams on this site are good source for you to test various format as well.

Below, I am sharing collective list of sample HLS Files and List of Publicly available HLS streams including DASH streams for you to help with your development.

What is HLS Streaming?

HTTP Live Streaming (HLS) is a streaming protocol developed by Apple for delivering live and on-demand media content over the internet. It is widely used for streaming video and audio content to devices such as smartphones, tablets, smart TVs, and desktop computers.
HLS works by breaking the media stream into small chunks and sending them over the internet using HTTP. Each chunk is typically a few seconds long and is encoded in a specific video format, such as H.264, and an audio format, such as AAC. These chunks are then stored on a web server, and a playlist file, usually in M3U8 format, is generated and sent to the client device.
The playlist file contains a list of the available chunks, along with their URLs and metadata, such as duration and bitrate. The client device requests the playlist file and uses it to download the chunks one by one and play them in sequence. The client device can also adapt the quality of the stream based on the available bandwidth, which means that the video quality can be adjusted to match the network conditions.
HLS is widely supported by web browsers, mobile devices, and streaming media players, and it is compatible with both iOS and Android devices. It is also used by many popular streaming services, including Netflix, YouTube, and Amazon Prime Video.

M3U8 /  HLS(HTTP Live Streaming) streams for testing:

The HLS test streams (.m3u8 streams)  are difficult to find. Here is a quick list of streams that you can use for testing m3u8 format. Copy paste the links to your browser for downloading them.

• https://demo.unified-streaming.com/k8s/features/stable/video/tears-of-steel/tears-of-steel.ism/.m3u8 - [New] Tears of Steel m3u8
• https://devstreaming-cdn.apple.com/videos/streaming/examples/img_bipbop_adv_example_fmp4/master.m3u8 - [New] fMP4 m3u8
• https://demo.unified-streaming.com/k8s/features/stable/video/tears-of-steel/tears-of-steel.mp4/.m3u8 - [New] MP4 m3u8
• https://cph-p2p-msl.akamaized.net/hls/live/2000341/test/master.m3u8 - [New] Live Akamai m3u8
• https://moctobpltc-i.akamaihd.net/hls/live/571329/eight/playlist.m3u8 - [New] Live Akamai m3u8
• http://d3rlna7iyyu8wu.cloudfront.net/skip_armstrong/skip_armstrong_stereo_subs.m3u8  - [New] Dolby VOD m3u8. It works on HTTP, if you see it erroring out, reload the HLS player using HTTP 
• http://d3rlna7iyyu8wu.cloudfront.net/skip_armstrong/skip_armstrong_multichannel_subs.m3u8 [New] Dolby Multichannel m3u8
• http://d3rlna7iyyu8wu.cloudfront.net/skip_armstrong/skip_armstrong_multi_language_subs.m3u8 [New] Dolby Multilanguage m3u8
• http://amssamples.streaming.mediaservices.windows.net/91492735-c523-432b-ba01-faba6c2206a2/AzureMediaServicesPromo.ism/manifest(format=m3u8-aapl) - [New] Azure HLSv4 m3u8
• http://amssamples.streaming.mediaservices.windows.net/69fbaeba-8e92-4740-aedc-ce09ae945073/AzurePromo.ism/manifest(format=m3u8-aapl) - [New] Azure HLSv4 m3u8
• http://amssamples.streaming.mediaservices.windows.net/634cd01c-6822-4630-8444-8dd6279f94c6/CaminandesLlamaDrama4K.ism/manifest(format=m3u8-aapl) - [New] Azure 4K HLSv4 m3u8
• http://qthttp.apple.com.edgesuite.net/1010qwoeiuryfg/sl.m3u8

• http://devimages.apple.com/iphone/samples/bipbop/bipbopall.m3u8

• http://devimages.apple.com/iphone/samples/bipbop/gear1/prog_index.m3u8

• http://playertest.longtailvideo.com/adaptive/oceans_aes/oceans_aes.m3u8 (AES encrypted)

• http://playertest.longtailvideo.com/adaptive/captions/playlist.m3u8 (HLS stream with CEA-608 captions)

• http://playertest.longtailvideo.com/adaptive/wowzaid3/playlist.m3u8 (with Metadata)

• http://content.jwplatform.com/manifests/vM7nH0Kl.m3u8

• http://cdn-fms.rbs.com.br/hls-vod/sample1_1500kbps.f4v.m3u8

• http://cdn-fms.rbs.com.br/vod/hls_sample1_manifest.m3u8

• http://www.nacentapps.com/m3u8/index.m3u8 (VOD)
• https://hlstests.eurofins-digitaltesting.com

• http://content.jwplatform.com/manifests/vM7nH0Kl.m3u8 ( Link protection, Video not Encrypted )

• http://vevoplaylist-live.hls.adaptive.level3.net/vevo/ch1/appleman.m3u8 (LIVE TV) (link is down)

• http://vevoplaylist-live.hls.adaptive.level3.net/vevo/ch2/appleman.m3u8 (LIVE TV) (link is down)

• http://vevoplaylist-live.hls.adaptive.level3.net/vevo/ch3/appleman.m3u8 (LIVE TV) (link is down)

• http://sample.vodobox.net/skate_phantom_flex_4k/skate_phantom_flex_4k.m3u8 (4K HLS Video stream)(link is down)

• http://srv6.zoeweb.tv:1935/z330-live/stream/playlist.m3u8 (LIVE TV) (link is down)

[EDIT] Added few more direct links which include m3u8 file format http://www.streambox.fr/playlists/test_001/stream.m3u8 https://bitdash-a.akamaihd.net/content/MI201109210084_1/m3u8s/f08e80da-bf1d-4e3d-8899-f0f6155f6efa.m3u8 https://bitdash-a.akamaihd.net/content/sintel/hls/playlist.m3u8 https://mnmedias.api.telequebec.tv/m3u8/29880.m3u8 http://184.72.239.149/vod/smil:BigBuckBunny.smil/playlist.m3u8 Below are few HLS test streams from the Apple. So Apple has not left us all alone. They have shared few pages on their own website where you can verify the HLS test streams. https://developer.apple.com/streaming/examples/basic-stream-osx-ios4-3.html http://devimages.apple.com/iphone/samples/bipbopgear1.html http://devimages.apple.com/iphone/samples/bipbopgear2.html http://devimages.apple.com/iphone/samples/bipbopgear3.html http://devimages.apple.com/iphone/samples/bipbopgear4.html http://devimages.apple.com/iphone/samples/bipbopall.html AES HLS proxy simulation (Thanks to MS Azure):  Likewise other platforms, Microsoft(MS) and Azure Media Services have also been working really hard with DASH. They have come up with MPEG-DASH and below is the link.  http://blogs.msdn.com/b/interoperability/archive/2014/01/03/mpeg-dash-tutorial-embedding-an-adaptive-streaming-video-within-your-html5-application.aspx       Dynamic https://amp.azure.net/libs/amp/latest/samples/dynamic_aes_token_withHLSProxy.html       Static https://amp.azure.net/libs/amp/latest/samples/videotag_aes_token_withHLSProxy.html Adding few more DASH URLs to the List DASH Industry Forum:MPEG-DASH Test Vectors  http://testassets.dashif.org/#testvector/list New HLS DATA sets from different sources There are different university that are also working HLS and we are lucky to have such data set available to us. Thanks to the researchers for their work. University Klagenfurt, ITEC DASH Dataset: It was one of the first MPEG-DASH dataset available and now it also has MPEG-DASH. You can see the content with Full movie length  in different resolutions till 1080p.  http://www-itec.uni-klu.ac.at/dash/?page_id=207 Telecom ParisTech, GPAC: UHD HEVC DASH Dataset: These guys have UHD HEVC dataset, which they created under 4Ever project . The DASH sequences provided by them is  HEVC encoding from 720p30 @ 2Mbps up to 2160p60 @ 20 Mbps. They have content with 1080p60 and 10 bits 2160p60 . The dataset content is distributed under the terms of the Creative Common by-nc-nd Licence. http://download.tsi.telecom-paristech.fr/gpac/dataset/dash/uhd/ http://www.streambox.fr/playlists/test_001/stream.m3u8 BBC MPEG-DASH Test Data: BBC have been leading in forefront on MPEG-DASH and they do actively work on it. BBC uses MPEG DASH in their productions and have shared us the RnD link. BBC Tests Data streams Youtube : Why would Google be behind. Youtube. Google Movies uses  MPEG-DASH mostly. They do have DRM protected content which utlizes MPEG-CENC and Widevine. http://dash-mse-test.appspot.com/media.html GPAC MPEG-DASH Dataset: From the content which they had shared, its very easy to use and test. Their content includes ISO Base Media File Format as well as MPEG2-TS. http://gpac.wp.mines-telecom.fr/2012/02/23/dash-sequences Do let me know in comments, if you find the links useful. Credit goes to Apple, Akamai, Unified Streaming, Dolby, Azure for generating and hosting these free HLS m3u8 URLs for the community. You can refer to RTSP URL sample pages here You May Also like my Post : HOW TO Speed Up your Browser Incoming search results: hls test urls, hls streaming urls, hls test url list, HLS URL samples HLS stream samples, M3u8 free urls, m3u8 sample urls for testing