Reverse proxying a HLS stream with nginx

I have an upstream HLS stream that I need to proxy to the outside world. The provider doesn’t want me to have more than one connection at a time. They basically do not want to deal with infrastructure problems.

I have successfully used proxy_pass for the .ts, chunklist and playlist files and I am successfully caching the media files so that the traffic to the upstream server is on a levels as if if it were 1/2 users.

The problem is that when I tried caching the chunklist file (for just 1 second) the stream would lag/hang sometimes. If I don’t do that, then the upstream server will be hit hard (I assume)?

There must be something simple I am missing.

Latency is not really important, by the way. It can have a significant delay.

My current config:

server {
 listen  80;
 listen [::]:80;
 server_name localhost;
 root /usr/share/nginx/html;

 location ~ ^/(.*pla.*) {
  proxy_pass https://upstream-provider.com/$1;
  proxy_ignore_headers Cache-Control;
  proxy_cache_valid any 5s;
  proxy_hide_header Cache-Control;
  add_header Cache-Control "public, max-age=5";
  proxy_cache edge-cache;
 }

 location ~ ^/(.*chunklist.*) {
  proxy_pass https://upstream-provider.com/$1;
  proxy_ignore_headers Cache-Control;
  proxy_cache_valid any 1s;
  proxy_hide_header Cache-Control;
  add_header Cache-Control "public, max-age=1";
  proxy_cache edge-cache;
 }

 location ~ ^/(.*media.*) {
  proxy_ignore_headers Cache-Control;
  proxy_cache_valid any 2m;
  proxy_hide_header Cache-Control;
  add_header Cache-Control "public, max-age=20";
  proxy_cache edge-cache;
 }

Is there any way of making my nginx download the ts/m3u8 files and serve them with a delay of a few seconds so that the cache can get filled?

I was thinking of writing a small service that handles that logic and puts it in a filesystem and make nginx serve files from the filesystem. Then I’d have to also handle providing a delayed chunklist which seems like a pain.

Any advice is welcome.