[elsurudo]

It's not that proprietary. FFMpeg supports creating these streams – I once created an encoding pipeline using HLS for a gig. The idea behind the tech is pretty good.

But yeah, browser support is very poor – I had to use a Flash fallback for browsers that didn't support it (which was basically everything but Safari at the time... looks like that sadly still hasn't changed).

At the time it was the best thing for the job, but I haven't done anything with video lately. What would be the best tool for the job these days? Regarding browsers support, etc.

[TD-Linux]

You can still use it via Javascript that repackages the MPEG-TS into MP4 files. However, DASH or a similar home-rolled solution could potentially avoid the repackaging.

[kbenson]

Yeah, HLS is really just an extension to the .m3u streaming MP3 playlist format. It's not hard to reason about or understand.