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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-21T19:36:06+00:00

I’m working on improving the experience of a site by adding in iPad support.

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I’m working on improving the experience of a site by adding in iPad support. This includes support for videos. Our client is pushing towards a YouTube model for storing and serving videos — great for us! I originally planned to implement the use of YouTube’s new HTML5-supporting <iframe> snippets. This offloads the device detection to YouTube and makes embedding a video a cinch as we don’t need to worry about compatibility. It turns out the the CMS we’re using, Sitecore CMS, strips out <iframe>‘s from our WYSIWYG editor. After a lot of research it looks like its a bit hard to not make this happen.

Fast forward to now… I tested out the old style <embed> code and discovered even though iOS doesn’t support Flash, these embeds seem to work fine on iPad. Some Stack Overflow research led me to this post which suggests its because of the YouTube plugin /System/Library/Internet Plug-Ins/YouTubePlugIn.webplugin on iPads that allows for the playback.

My question is, is there any documentation that this is the exact reason? I’d like to go by this as why we can use the regular <embed> code but I need to back it up with proof via a document for iOS. Is this YT plug-in on every iPad by default, or do users need to manually install it? This seems like a great solution considering our unfortunate incompatibility with an <iframe> but I need to support the use of the <embed>‘s with hard facts. Thanks in advance.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    The answer you are looking for is to be found in Apple’s URL Scheme Reference. Basically it’s a mechanism that comes into play on the iDevices to detect and handle specifically, certain types of URLs – for instance Google Maps, iTunes and also YouTube.

    Here’s a few reference links.

    https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/featuredarticles/iPhoneURLScheme_Reference/Introduction/Introduction.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/TP40007899

    https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/featuredarticles/iPhoneURLScheme_Reference/YouTubeLinks/YouTubeLinks.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/TP40007895-SW1

    And just for good measure, you might also want to take a look at the Safari Developer Library for the best practice recommendations on HTML5 Video and Audio embedding 🙂

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