HLS

moq export hls serves a MoQ broadcast as HLS over HTTP for players that can't speak MoQ. moq import hls pulls a remote HLS master or media playlist into a broadcast.

# Serve. Players open http://localhost:8089/my-stream.hang/master.m3u8
moq --connect https://relay.example.com/anon --broadcast my-stream.hang export hls --listen '[::]:8089'

# Import
moq --connect https://relay.example.com/anon --broadcast my-stream.hang import hls https://example.com/live/master.m3u8

Export never subscribes to media. It reads the broadcast's timeline track, a log of complete segments aligned across every rendition, to build playlists, then fetches exactly the groups a requested segment covers from the relay's cache and transmuxes them to CMAF on demand. So a segment is servable for as long as the relay's cache retains it, and idle renditions cost nothing. Because segments are aligned, the same number names the same span of content in every media playlist; a record with nothing for a rendition renders as EXT-X-GAP and a jump in content time as EXT-X-DISCONTINUITY. A broadcast whose catalog advertises no timeline is skipped. One server exposes every broadcast by path:

/{broadcast}/master.m3u8
/{broadcast}/manifest.mpd
/{broadcast}/{video|audio}/{rendition}/media.m3u8
/{broadcast}/{video|audio}/{rendition}/init.{hash}.mp4
/{broadcast}/{video|audio}/{rendition}/seg/{segment}.m4s
/{broadcast}/{video|audio}/{rendition}/seg/t{pts}.m4s

The init URL carries a hash of its bytes, so a reconfigured rendition gets a new one. An embedder of the library can also label the publisher's run with Broadcaster::set_generation. Every segment URL then carries it (seg/{generation}.{segment}.m4s), since a restarted publisher reuses segment numbers for different media.

--window sets the playlist duration (default 16 s), --listen-tls-cert/--listen-tls-key or --listen-tls-generate serve HTTPS, and --cors-origin opens it to browsers. H.264/H.265 and AAC/Opus renditions are served. Import handles classic HLS; LL-HLS parts are not implemented yet. It publishes the playlist's own media times, and the catalog clock maps the first imported segment to the time it arrived, one mapping for every rendition. The library is moq-hls.

Recording segments

moq_hls::export::segments::Segment::discontinuity is the absolute timeline sequence within one Broadcaster. Cursors created at different times report the same sequence for the same timeline span, including after a rendition rebinds. Skipping unavailable segments does not reset the sequence.

HLS numbers a segment as EXT-X-DISCONTINUITY-SEQUENCE plus the EXT-X-DISCONTINUITY tags before it (RFC 8216, section 6.2.1), and matching content in every rendition must share that number. A recorder writes the first retained segment's value as EXT-X-DISCONTINUITY-SEQUENCE, then writes current - previous EXT-X-DISCONTINUITY tags before each later segment. The difference can exceed one when the cursor skipped every segment of an epoch, and one tag per change would then fall behind sibling renditions. Retain the absolute value in the index alongside each segment.

Recreating the broadcaster starts a new sequence namespace. Start a new recording/playlist, or explicitly map the new broadcaster's sequences into a recording-wide sequence with a discontinuity at the boundary. Do not compare raw values across broadcaster instances or infer a restart from zero alone.

When updating moq.pro's moq-hls pin to this breaking release, update its recorder and index together: store the returned sequence directly instead of accumulating per-cursor break counts. Existing indexes containing counts need conversion within their original recording namespace before combining them with new data.