HLS M3U8 Parser/Generator

This project is a tool for working with HLS (HTTP Live Streaming) playlists — the files that tell video players where to find chunks of video to play. If you've ever watched a video stream online, your player was likely reading one of these m3u8 files to know which video segments to download and in what order.

The repo does two main things: it can read m3u8 playlist files and understand their structure (parsing), and it can take data and generate new m3u8 files from scratch (generating). Think of it like a translator that converts between the plain-text m3u8 format and structured data that code can work with easily. Instead of manually parsing text line by line, developers can use this library to instantly understand what's in a playlist or build one programmatically.

You'd use this if you're building anything around video streaming — a video player, a streaming service backend, a CDN, or a tool that manages video content. For example, a company running a live sports streaming platform needs to generate playlists that point to newly encoded video segments as they're created, and this library handles that formatting work. Or if you're building a player app and need to read and validate playlists from various sources, this ensures you're parsing them correctly according to the official HLS standard.

The project is written in Rust, a systems programming language known for being fast and reliable. The code includes examples showing how to parse an m3u8 string, and it's well-documented with tests and coverage tracking. The README doesn't detail specific features beyond the core parsing and generation capability, but the full documentation is available online for developers who need to integrate this into their projects.