We have an ASP.NET 4 website that displays flash files. It has come to our attention that these are not fully supported on HTML5, and that they will not play on HTML5 platforms such as the iPad.
So, in order to support such platforms, my thinking is that we need to try and display the video using the HTML5 <video> tag if the browser supports HTML5, or fall back to flash if it does not.
However, it would seem that this requires our site to provide two video formats (flash format and video such as MP4). That presents problems because A), we need to store multiple video formats on the site, and B) our existing flash data will no longer work.
Can anyone recommend information about the best way to support as many platforms as possible. And is there any way to do so without having to support multiple video formats?
I’ve dealt with this issue in the past. My solution to this was to standardize on a video format: mp4. Flash supports mp4 encoding as do the iOS devices.
If your using flv functionality such as cuepoints your going to have to come up with a solution to solve that. Mine was to simulate cuepoints using actionscript.
Once you have standardized on a valid video encoding you will need to decide when you want to display a video tag or a flash element. I decided to display flash if possible and only display the video tag if flash wasn’t available. The main reason I did this was because of firefox. Even though firefox supports the video tag it does not support the mp4 encoding. In the end, using my solution most browsers show the flash implementation of my videos and iOS devices show the video tag implementation.