Embedding Video In a Site For iPhone/iPod?

Russ writes "Our corporate media delivery platform is in the process of being refactored (at long, long last), and one of the preferred requirements is the ability to serve streaming video to iPhone and iPod Touch devices, similar to the way YouTube does it — show a screen shot, and when the user taps it, the video should play full-screen and landscaped automatically. The problem comes from the severe lack of documentation Apple provides on how, precisely, this can be done. From what I can tell, YouTube still fires a Flash object to the iPhone despite its lack of Flash support. I have, to a certain extent, been able to review some of YouTube's Flash code and get a hack working on our platform (no screenshot, not landscape, but does play automatically), but I'm sure I'm missing a 'trick of the trade' somewhere that makes the process transparent to the user. Has anyone out there done this before, and if so, how? The standard (and non-standard) Quicktime object/embed codes seem to only provide partial functionality on the iPhone/iPod."

Comments

AS Long as we're doing this---

[way2trivial]

anyone want to tell me how I can duplicate redtube (NSFW in a million years) video thumbnails?

They are rather excellent, and I aussume automated.....

RSTP

[sakusha]

Streaming QuickTime has been a continual subject of discussion on the QuickTime Streaming Server listserv. Note that I am not referring to progressive download QT, I'm talking about RSTP streaming. Services like YouTube have the ability to detect the maximum bandwidth of the receiving device and deliver a stream encoded for that bitrate. In YouTube's case, they have a custom app that detects whether you're on EDGE or WiFi and delivers a progressive streaming file of higher or lower quality. I have been dissatisfied with the YouTube service, it seems to always stream poorly. And you have to wait and wait for enough of the file to load before it will start playing. Usually my iPhone (even on WiFi) goes to sleep and shuts off long before I can start watching, which aborts the download.

What the QTSS listserv people are all begging for is true RSTP streaming from QuickTime Streaming Server to the iPhone in Mobile Safari, and an API for apps. QTSS detects your device's bandwidth and delivers a true stream with the appropriate bitrate so it can begin playing instantly, and if you drag the playback slider to any point in the file, it begins playing instantly from that point. This would be a huge advantage, but there is a downside. Since the stream is being delivered continuously on demand, you can't deliver higher bandwidth (higher quality) files that would take a while to download. The file's bitrate may be no more than the channel would allow. But us QTSS users think this is an advantage, I would gladly trade off a little quality for instant-on playback. Another advantage is that QTSS can deliver live video from QuickTime Broadcaster, so live TV events can be delivered live.

The upshot of the deal is, Apple has not yet enabled RSTP in the iPhone, so it is not available in apps like Mobile Safari. I personally believe (without any evidence) that this is Apple's attempt to cripple Mobile Safari so as to not antagonize AT&T by overloading their network with streaming video. But there are some apps that have RTSP streaming now, there's an app that streams college radio stations (I forgot the name of the app). I don't know how they got it to work, they must have their own RTSP code, it's not in any current iPhone 2.0 OS API.

I have been telling people for years, if you wanted to start a new TV delivery method, all you'd have to do would be roll out a new line of smartphones with adequate data capacity and live streaming like QTSS. You could start another major network overnight. I've found the quality of TV watching on my iPhone (from my own manually encoded files) to be perfectly fine. But Apple won't enable RTSP on the iPhone... yet. Maybe they have something coming in iPhone OS 3.0, but there hasn't even been a hint of this capacity. Plenty of people are filing the request with the appropriate Apple people, and we get no response whatsoever. Let us hope that no news is good news, and they are not leaking or hinting at anything because they are under an NDA because it's about to roll out.

Re:Stop contributing to the Apple monopoly

[centuren]

Stop contributing to the Apple monopoly. You aren't helping matters when you support it. We consumers end up with less choice and more problems. The iPhone, the iPod, all crap lock-in and not even real "platforms" despite people acting like it is something you can develop for.

Regardless of one's feelings toward Apple and the iPhone, I think this is an interesting question to address. At least, I have no desire to own or develop for an iPhone, but I do have great interest in not using Flash.

If there's any one thing I like about the iPhone, it has people asking questions like "How can I provide a good user experience for streaming video on a platform that doesn't support Adobe's Flash plugin?". The iPhone is obviously a proprietary, closed platform, but I appreciate that at least to a small degree it's making people think about solutions that had become almost universally tied to other proprietary technology.

I hope to see fewer browser plugins like Flash on all smart phones, so that solutions such as the YouTube app can be taken advantage of to produce desktop solutions where Flash is also unavailable (or unwanted).

Problem partially solved!

[dpu]

Thanks to those that took a moment for a constructive answer! Turns out that using the embed/object parameters slightly differently solves both the thumbnail and auto-orientation issues.

The bad thing is that the video object (at least using Quicktime - iPhone Safari doesn't support the HTML5 video tag yet) can't be scripted via Javascript.

The ADC has absolutely no mention of scripting the iPhone video object via Javascript - it doesn't say it can't be done, but the object doesn't fire any events that I can find either.

We use JS to handle tracking - we need to know how much of the video the user watched, if they muted it extensively, etc. due to the credit requirements of one of our clients. We'd love to deliver an iPhone-capable version of the site, but without scripting capability it won't happen.

So the bonus question to this post is does anyone have (or has anyone found) information regarding scripting the iPhone 2.x video object from a web page using Javascript?