HLS 10 second segment and seeking

Question

Apple recommends having hls segments of 10 seconds, however this means that seeking would be limited to every 10 seconds.

I have tried shorter segments of 3 seconds and this is better for seeking but this is not ideal or recommended.

Is there anyway of keeping the segments at 10 seconds but allowing for better seeking?

Would adding a key frame every 30 frames (1 key frames every second) allow for better seeking?

Answer 1

Ultimately, it depends upon your player. If I'm watching a video with the default iPad player, I can navigate via the progress bar on the bottom and seek to any point in the video, and it works very well, regardless of segment length or key frame cadence.

Some players support the #EXT-X-I-FRAMES-ONLY attribute. This implementation of trick play works by only playing back the intra frames. This was introduced in version 4 of the Pantos spec, and I have only seen it working well on newer iPads. A good sample clip can be found here.