Is it a good idea to use HLS for short videos (15 seconds maximum)?
I am creating an iOS app that will stream a video with a maximum length of 15 seconds. I read good things about HLS, so I transcoded the video with a segment size of 5 seconds. The good thing is if the first part of the video takes too long to load, we can revert to a lower quality within the next 10 seconds.
However, I'm not sure if the additional complexity is worth adding. The main disadvantage is that we need to transcode additional videos for the internet. Another issue is that AVPlayer on iOS is basically a black box and it would be difficult or impossible to create features like caching segments to disk or reusing bandwidth measurements between videos. I think we would need to build our own HLS player from scratch so that we can use these features, and that will take a lot of effort.
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If the video is only 15 seconds long, it might be overkill to use HLS. Yes AVPlayer is a black box and in my experience I have not seen it transmit the switching bitrate after playing only one segment. I think that it behaves in exactly the opposite way, i.e. Starts playing at a lower bitrate and then encounters a higher bitrate (not really sure about that).
About writing a custom player You can send all requests from AVPlayer through a local http proxy and try to host smart caching logic there. I've seen some apps do this for DRM-protected content, but using it for non-DRM content cannot be approved by the app store.
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