I am testing Apple HLS-LL stream with media3/Exoplayer and have observed following behaviour which does not seem optimum. The player is requesting all video variants playlists between downloading video partial segments.

• I used Apple HLS-LL reference stream https://ll-hls-test.cdn-apple.com/llhls4/ll-hls-test-04/multi.m3u8 for testing

• It has 4 video variants. I captured network traffic of playlist and segment requests using Charles proxy and observed that player is making request for all 4 video variant playlists between downloading consecutive partial video segments. Charles file is attached as zip.
  HLS_LL_Apple_multiple_variant_download.chls.zip

• The behaviour seems sub-optimal as it will increase load on CDN and would may contribute to increased latency. This test stream has only 4 video variants but a production stream could have 6-8 video variants making the behaviour worse if all 8 video variants are downloaded between each consecutive partial segment download.

• Sharing a screenshot of Charles capture showing all variant playlists downloaded between segment downloads

Questions

• Is this expected behaviour of Exoplayer? If yes, then what is the rational behind this?
• Is there a configuration to change the behaviour to only download the active variant playlist from which the partial segments are picked for download?