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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."
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).