Why the "native_hls_parsing" tweak configuration makes the player fail in macOS 12.3 / safari 15.4?

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The documentation says tweaks.native_hls_parsing makes the underlying player of Safari fetch and parse the HLS playlists in lieu of the Bitmovin Player.

This results in requests returning 416 network errors (416 Requested Range Not Satisfiable) as I could confirm by reproducing the issue manually.

1600×188 170 KB
.

What’s causing this? Is there a fix or workaround?

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Due to an issue with the latest version of WebKit, Safari is sending requests to the blob URLs using the following:

Range: bytes=0-*
instead of the expected
Range: bytes=0-

Setting the native_hls_parsing tweak to false (default value) is known to be a suitable workaround to the issue.

The same behaviour has been reported on Apple’s developer forum as well in another context.

We are monitoring new releases of Safari and will update this thread once we become aware of a resolution.

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3

This issue should be fixed in the next version of Safari.

4

Safari 15.5 was officially launched with the issue fix in the new WebKit engine. It’s now available in macOS Monterey 12.4, macOS Big Sur, macOS Catalina, iPadOS 15.5, and iOS 15.5.

It looks a related fix was stated in the Safari’s release note too, although I think the issue was not limited to audio.

  • Fixed playback of HTML5 embedded audio with unbounded range requests
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