Stream selection

warning

We are phasing out Media Parser and are moving to Mediabunny!

Some containers such as .m3u8 (and in the future .mpd) support multiple equivalent streams, of which you are supposed to select one.
For example, a .m3u8 file might contain multiple video streams with different resolutions.

Selecting a M3U stream

Use the selectM3uStream option to select a stream.

import {parseMedia} from '@remotion/media-parser';

const media = await parseMedia({
  src: 'https://test-streams.mux.dev/x36xhzz/x36xhzz.m3u8',
  selectM3uStream: ({streams}) => {
    for (const stream of streams) {
      console.log(stream.dimensions); // {width: 1920, height: 1080}
      console.log(stream.bandwidthInBitsPerSec); // 4400000
      console.log(stream.src); // "https://test-streams.mux.dev/x36xhzz/193039199_mp4_h264_aac_hd_7.m3u8"
      console.log(stream.averageBandwidthInBitsPerSec); // null
      console.log(stream.codecs); // ["avc1.640028", "mp4a.40.2"]
      console.log(stream.associatedPlaylists); // See below
    }

    return streams[0].id;
  },
});

You must return the id of the stream you want to select.
By default, the stream with the highest resolution is selected (sorted by width multiplied by height).

Show a stream selection interface

If you want an end user to pick the quality, it is recommended that you use two passes.
You can extract the streams in the first pass and then show a UI to the user to pick the quality.

import {parseMedia} from '@remotion/media-parser';

const {m3uStreams} = await parseMedia({
  src: 'https://test-streams.mux.dev/x36xhzz/x36xhzz.m3u8',
  fields: {
    m3uStreams: true,
  },
});

Resorting to default behavior

If you want to resort to the default behavior (selecting the stream with the highest resolution), use the defaultSelectM3uStreamFn function.

import {parseMedia, defaultSelectM3uStreamFn} from '@remotion/media-parser';

const media = await parseMedia({
  src: 'https://test-streams.mux.dev/x36xhzz/x36xhzz.m3u8',
  selectM3uStream: (params) => {
    // Add custom logic

    // ...

    // Resort to default behavior
    return defaultSelectM3uStreamFn(params);
  },
});

Selecting an audio track

Once a primary stream has been selected, another callback may get invoked allowing you to pick "associated playlists" of the primary stream.

An associated playlist is an audio track, but it could in the future also be a subtitle track.

import {parseMedia} from '@remotion/media-parser';

await parseMedia({
  src: 'https://test-streams.mux.dev/x36xhzz/x36xhzz.m3u8',
  selectM3uAssociatedPlaylists: ({associatedPlaylists}) => {
    return associatedPlaylists.filter((playlist) => {
      // Information relayed from the .m3u8:
      console.log(playlist.groupId); // string
      console.log(playlist.language); // string | null
      console.log(playlist.name); // string | null
      console.log(playlist.autoselect); // boolean
      console.log(playlist.default); // boolean
      console.log(playlist.channels); // number | null
      console.log(playlist.src); // string

      return playlist.default;
    });
  },
});

The default behavior is to select the single associated playlist if there is only one, and otherwise select all associated playlists with the default: true attribute. The behavior is implemented by the filter function defaultSelectM3uAssociatedPlaylists.

import {parseMedia, defaultSelectM3uAssociatedPlaylists} from '@remotion/media-parser';

const media = await parseMedia({
  src: 'https://test-streams.mux.dev/x36xhzz/x36xhzz.m3u8',
  selectM3uAssociatedPlaylists: defaultSelectM3uAssociatedPlaylists,
});

Each M3uStream has a field stream.associatedPlaylists listing the associated audio tracks, which is useful for showing a UI for selecting the audio track.

See also

• parseMedia()