Our CDN (DaCast) has started providing HLS streaming with low latency.
Right now the only encoder that allows HLS encoding is a free OBS Studio version specially provided by DaCast - however, this is nowhere near as functional as vMix to use as a mixer.
When will vMix be able to encode streams as HLS (if ever)?
This would be extremely useful.

Sorry, did not see your post till now...
How would one stream from vMix to OBS - would that be using 2 computers (one for each software)?
What would the output from vMix be and what would be the input to OBS?
Thanks for any advice...

+1 for HLS streaming output.

Late to the party, but if your VMix computer crashed or dies, what happens then? What’s more likely to crash, the VMix computer handling all the load from cutting a show, or the machine streaming from one input. We use a second computer to stream and a copy of the VMix project ready to fire up in case the primary crashes. It lessens the load on the primary and gives us something to go to like a “we’ll be right back” slide should anything happens to the primary.

not going to have much of a choice soon as RTMP is dying Dec 31. https://forums.aws.amazon.com/ann.jspa?annID=7356

This is an interesting subject, and I think we would all welcome some expert advice. According to amazon link above, the following are planned for the future:
HTTP Live Streaming (HLS)
Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP (DASH)
Microsoft Smooth Streaming (MSS)
HTTP Dynamic Streaming (HDS)
And most importantly, it would be good to know what vMix future plan is for available encoders.

But also of interest, and which vMix has partial capability is SRT. Haivision (developers) have been doing testing around the world, showing how SRT compares to RTMP. They don't compare it with HLS.

I've been using SRT for a while and have to say it's improvement of RTMP. Mostly because the latency is "set" and video "fixed" when packets are lost via the overhead in the SRT protocol. While not technically faster than RTMP, it has error correction and can tolerate packet loss. How much packet-loss largely depends on how you set the latency (in milliseconds), plus the overhead bandwidth which by default is usually around 20% and doesn't need modification.

I think SRT is a great protocol for me fantastic to get video to the streaming server (my server supports it). Between streaming servers (again supported), so you can build your own CDN with reliable latency.

For now it's not a last mile protocol. So from the streaming server to the client, not really popular/useful. That might change.

I wish Youtube and Facebook would accept it, but for now I "republish" via RTMP(S) from our servers.

Vmix SRT --> Cloud Server with heaps of bandwidth --> Clients via SLDP with HLS fallback on Apple devices.

With your Cloud server, you can host that in a VPS, it can then use SRT from the closest server, to distribute to the other servers strategically placed closer to your viewers and with SRT of course you control the latency.

Cloud Server #1 might be in Australia --> SRT (200ms fixed latency) Cloud Server #2 in Singapore --> Viewer hitting Singapore server.

And of course you can rent as many cloud servers as you like and host them at virtually any VPS provider. Linux skills would be required to roll your own solution like that. I use Nimble Streaming Server, but I believe Wowza can do it too.

For Joe Average not interested in becoming a Linux Server Administrator, will be great when Youtube, Vimeo, Facebook, everyone supports SRT ingest.

The next logical step is then native SRT playback in web browsers and phones, so that you can control Streaming Server --> Client latency/quality as well.

Not saying to not add HLS encoding to VMix, but I wouldn't use it and I think long term SRT has a very bright future. HLS has very wide client end support, virtually everything can play it without fancy app downloads or proprietary clients. I hope SRT dissolves the need for HLS, but for now HLS support might be useful because the protocol is simply SO popular with CDNs.

SRT is consistent on a network usage graph. Much like RTMP. So it's not a chunk type setup blasting a segment from what I can see. There is great information on SRT that gets more detailed than I can go into, just google secure reliable transport. Googling SRT often returns stuff about the video subtitle format and it's specifications.

Being UDP, is why it works well for sure, it's putting things back together in a way that works for video and error correction.

Commercial CDNs might struggle with SRT, it's not exactly the kind of thing you want to chunk, buffer and cache. I'm sure they will find a way if the protocol became super popular. You can however get UDP (from Vmix) and forward to many IP addresses (players) with the aid of a streaming server that supports SRT. So essentially broadcasting to many people.

Given how crucial this issue is to ongoing, successful Live Streaming, should this not be escalated in the dev cycle given it was first raised (here at least) three years ago? Am I missing something or has everyone just jumped on YouTube/Vimeo 'promercial' offerings who, for now at least, still accept RTMP? I would be interested to hear the thoughts of the Community.

2023 Bump

For us, vMix's adoption of HLS is our top feature request. We stream club-level rowing events to YouTube. When using YouTube's regular RTMP ingest, mushy compression artefacting on the water and in surrounding trees has always been an issue, even at 1080p50 and a healthy stream rate. We've spent a lot of time trying different encoder settings, codecs, hardware, you name it, but always the same end result.

So, we've just streamed two day-long rowing regattas via YT's HLS ingest servers and the quality difference was incredible.

To do this, we added OBS with NDI to our vMix PC and NDI did the internal link seamlessly. Our vMIx system (running 5 x SDI 1080p50 inputs) ran at around 30% GPU and OBS 2.5%, so all was very easy for our Alienware Core i9 tower system. There is a small degradation (in the form of image softening) in the NDI conversion process, so if vMix incorporated HLS, we'd get that much closer to achieving a YouTube image quality to what we send it.

So vMix, now YouTube are offering this huge service improvement, we'd like to take direct advantage of it and cut out the OBS/NDI element.

RTMP really is a dead duck for quality live streaming today.