HLS & DASH Stream Checker
Validate a video manifest and its renditions
Paste an HLS or DASH manifest URL and see what a player would see: every rendition with its resolution, bitrate and codecs, whether the stream is live or on-demand, and the two things that most often stop a stream playing in a browser while the manifest itself is perfectly valid — a missing CORS header and the wrong content type.
Frequently asked questions
My stream plays in VLC but not in a browser. Why?
Almost always CORS. VLC does not enforce it; browsers do. The manifest and every segment need an Access-Control-Allow-Origin header, or a player on another domain cannot fetch them.
How many renditions should I encode?
Three to five covering roughly 400 kbps up to your source bitrate. Too few and viewers on poor connections stall; too many and you pay to encode and store ladder rungs nobody uses.
What content type should an m3u8 have?
application/vnd.apple.mpegurl. Some players accept application/x-mpegURL or octet-stream, but serving it as text/plain will break strict ones.