Adding CORS headers when requesting .m3u8 files using reverse proxy

Question

I'm building a Chromecast app, where I want to stream .m3u8 files (HLS) from a streaming provider. The streaming provider does not add CORS headers to the HTTP headers, which is a requirement for building Chromecast apps.

Is there any way to route the requests through a proxy, and have the proxy add the necessary headers for .m3u8 files? AFAICS, the .m3u8 files further point to files for the different bandwith streams, so it would be necessary to have the proxy add appropriate CORS headers to the header for those files as well.

Here is an example of a link to a .m3u8 file that I want to be able to stream.

Answer 1

Hey I realise I'm a bit late but I thought I would post here in case other find it usefull. I had the same problem when developing a chromecast application. The simple solution I found was to include the TOMODOkorz library this will pass all http requests through it's proxy.

You could host your own proxy and change the library to point to yours relatively easily.

Answer 2

This is actually possible by rewriting the urls within Chromecast's Media Player Library and having these sub-playlists also proxy through a CORS proxy like http://www.corsproxy.com/.

To do this in your custom receiver, do not import the google-hosted library
<script type="text/javascript" src="//www.gstatic.com/cast/sdk/libs/mediaplayer/0.5.0/media_player.js"></script>

Instead, copy the obfuscated javascript directly into your receiver html page, and do the following:

• Find+replace g.D.url=k with g.D.url='http://www.corsproxy.com/' + k.replace(/^(?:[a-z]+:)?\/\//i,'')
• Find+replace url:k with url:('http://www.corsproxy.com/' + k.replace(/^(?:[a-z]+:)?\/\//i,''))

Now, if you send the initial contentId to Chromecast with the http://www.corsproxy.com/YOUR_M3U8_FILE_HERE you should have a fully functional HLS-playing Chromecast app.

Answer 3

Most providers have the ability to set CORS for their customers. Akamai certainly does.

Answer 4

I've been able to stream HLS to ChromeCast from an S3 bucket by adding a permissive CORS file to the permissions for the bucket.

Answer 5

To answer my own question: This is not possible without rebroadcasting the streams. .m3u8 files are files containing links to other files, which in the end also contain the binaries. All of these, including the HTTP response containing the binary, needs the CORS headers for the Chromecast to display the contents.

If you're only looking to add CORS headers to textual responses corsproxy.com is a good alternative, a long with several available open source projects.