Too Long; Didn't Read
HLS is an HTTP-Based adaptive streaming communications protocol developed by Apple. It allows us to serve large media files as many smaller text files that are broken up into 10-second increments. By breaking them up in this way, our user's client-side app only needs to buffer 10 seconds in advance. Using FFmpeg, we can easily convert mp3 files to the HLS format, which consists of multiple files. The data files have a.ts extension and are served one-at-a-time at the client's request.