HLS stream not working on Apple devices

Question

I have a live RTSP stream that i have managed to transcode to HLS via VLC. Now it works perfect on Android and on desktop browsers (via flash).

But not on Apple (i can test it on iPad and desktop Safari on my virtual machine). I can see the player but when i press the 'play' button all i see is a black rectangle inside the player. On desktop Safari there is also a text 'Loading...' near the play/pause button and nothing else happens.

My HTML:

<video id="player" controls style="width:100%; height:100%">
  <source src="http://178.79.164.114/playlist.m3u8" type="application/x-mpegURL">
</video>

The command for vlc:

vlc -I dummy rtsp://<stream-url> --sout '#transcode{width=320,height=240,fps=25,vcodec=h264,vb=256,acodec=none,venc=x264{aud,profile=baseline,level=30,keyint=30,bframes=0,ref=1,nocabac}}:std{access=livehttp{seglen=10,delsegs=true,numsegs=5,index=/path/to/server/directory/playlist.m3u8,index-url=http://178.79.164.114/seg-########.ts},mux=ts{use-key-frames},dst=/path/to/server/directory/seg-########.ts}'

And an example of the playlist file:

#EXTM3U
#EXT-X-TARGETDURATION:10
#EXT-X-VERSION:3
#EXT-X-ALLOW-CACHE:NO
#EXT-X-MEDIA-SEQUENCE:179
#EXTINF:9.60,
http://178.79.164.114/seg-00000179.ts
#EXTINF:9.60,
http://178.79.164.114/seg-00000180.ts
#EXTINF:9.60,
http://178.79.164.114/seg-00000181.ts
#EXTINF:9.61,
http://178.79.164.114/seg-00000182.ts
#EXTINF:9.59,
http://178.79.164.114/seg-00000183.ts

And here is the strange output of ffprobe http://178.79.164.114/playlist.m3u8 (why there are these N/A and the variant_bitrate is 0?). Maybe it can help:

Input #0, hls,applehttp, from 'http://178.79.164.114/playlist.m3u8':
  Duration: N/A, start: 3995.330722, bitrate: N/A
  Program 0 
    Metadata:
      variant_bitrate : 0
    Stream #0:0: Video: h264 (Constrained Baseline) ([27][0][0][0] / 0x001B), yuv420p, 320x240 [SAR 11:12 DAR 11:9], 25 fps, 25 tbr, 90k tbn, 50 tbc

I have also configured correct MIME types for .m3u8 and .ts files and spent a day searching and trying different options for the transcode command: width, height, bitrate, fps, different profiles and levels... - nothing works. But if i try some examples from apple (http://devimages.apple.com/iphone/samples/bipbop/bipbopall.m3u8) - all is fine, though it's not a live stream.

If anyone has any ideas or has a possibility to test my stream with the mediastreamvalidator - please help.

UPDATE

Now i'm experimenting with variant playlist but it changes nothing.

Answer 1

The player might expect muxed video and audio so add a silent audio track.

The Apple HLS documentation says:

The media segment files are normally produced by the stream segmenter, based on input from the encoder, and consist of a series of .ts files containing segments of an MPEG-2 Transport Stream carrying H.264 video and AAC, MP3, or AC-3 audio

Support for audio-only streams is mentioned in Technical Note TN2224 and the 7th revision of the protocol introduced support for alternate renditions (unmuxed streams) but this is done with EXT-X-MEDIA tags in a master playlist controlling the playback (yours is a media playlist).