[FFmpeg-user] A question on multiple audio variants support on HLS' var_stream_map parameters.

[Dennis Mungai]

Hello there,

With the var_stream_map option, can more than one audio stream variant
exist in a group?
>From the documentation, all examples point to the creation of multiple
audio groups, one per audio  stream variant.

Lifted straight from the wiki:

https://ffmpeg.org/ffmpeg-formats.html#hls-2

This example creates the variant streams in subdirectories. Here, the
first media playlist is created at
http://example.com/live/vs_0/out.m3u8 and the second one at
http://example.com/live/vs_1/out.m3u8.

ffmpeg -re -i in.ts -b:a:0 32k -b:a:1 64k -b:v:0 1000k -b:v:1 3000k  \
  -map 0:a -map 0:a -map 0:v -map 0:v -f hls \
  -var_stream_map "a:0,agroup:aud_low a:1,agroup:aud_high
v:0,agroup:aud_low v:1,agroup:aud_high" \
  -master_pl_name master.m3u8 \
  http://example.com/live/out_%v.m3u8

Rather than separate the different audio variants into separate groups
as shown above, can they be merged in one audio group, eg:

ffmpeg -re -i in.ts -b:a:0 32k -b:a:1 64k -b:v:0 1000k -b:v:1 3000k  \
  -map 0:a -map 0:a -map 0:v -map 0:v -f hls \
  -var_stream_map "a:,agroup:audio v:0,agroup:audio v:1,agroup:audio" \
  -master_pl_name master.m3u8 \
  http://example.com/live/out_%v.m3u8

Is such a configuration supported?