Question

According to:

http://developer.android.com/sdk/android-2.0-highlights.html

Android 2.0 should support the HTML5 video element. I haven’t been able to get this to work using a Motorola Droid, and haven’t been able to successfully view a video on any of the HTML5 video example pages out there. Since there currently isn’t support for QuickTime or Flash, this is the only other thing I can think of for embedding mp4 video in a web page. Has anyone had any luck with this?

Answer 1

I’ve just done some experimentation with this, and from what I can tell you need three things:

1. You must not use the type attribute when calling the video.
2. You must manually call video.play()
3. The video must be encoded to some quite strict parameters; using the iPhone setting on Handbrake with the ‘Web Optimized’ button checked usually does the trick.

Have a look at the demo on this page: http://broken-links.com/tests/video/

This works, AFAIK, in all video-enabled desktop browsers, iPhone and Android.

Here’s the markup:

<video id="video" autobuffer height="240" width="360">
<source src="BigBuck.m4v">
<source src="BigBuck.webm" type="video/webm">
<source src="BigBuck.theora.ogv" type="video/ogg">
</video>

And I have this in the JS:

var video = document.getElementById('video');
video.addEventListener('click',function(){
  video.play();
},false);

I tested this on a Samsung Galaxy S and it works fine.