HTML5 video in Safari for iPhone and iPad

As we all know, Adobe and Apple aren’t best buddies, so Flash isn’t appearing on the iPhone/iPad any time soon. In fact, probably never. Therefore, with Flash being the king of video on the web, there’s only one option for showing video in the browser to iPhone and iPad users: HTML5 video. YouTube and some of the other big video services are rapidly moving to HTML5 video on the web anyway, despite it’s fairly limited browser support. The effort is worth it though as it makes the task of preparing and delivering video on the web much easier once Flash is out of the loop, and supporting the iPhone and iPad (and other mobile devices) should be standard practice, not an occasional extra. There’s an excellent tutorial at Dive Into HTML 5, though for the finer intricacies you’ll also want to head to the Apple Developer reference on HTML5 video. Oh, and to save you some head scratching, if you think you’ve done everything required but it still isn’t working on the iPhone, make sure you’re using BASELINE encoding. The iPhone is much more picky about this than the iPad.

30th July 2010

Ben Childs

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