Entertainment For Lively Minds
iPad video question.
Posted by DougieJ on 11 December 2011 - 11:44pm.
How come it's possible to watch YouTube but not football highlights such as this from the BBC site on the iPad?
Viewing the Word site on my HTC smartphone, I get a message 'flash player not installed' or similar, in place of any YouTube clips in blog postings.
What's the difference?
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Apple don't like Flash
and won't allow it on their iDevices. Most of the BBC website clips need Flash. Technical jiggery-pokery ensures you can view YouTube without Flash on an iPad.
The Word blog uses YouTube in its Flash version, not the Apple-friendly one.
Confusing, isn't it?
Indeed.
I was aware of the Adobe / Apple spat, which is why I was intrigued by the presence of YouTube on the iPad.
Hopefully, the sheer strength of the iPad and iPhone will ensure a speedy transition to the clearly superior solution (although I have great admiration for Adobe in other respects) of HTML5.
No
By which I mean it's a lot more complicated than that. People who simply repeat Steve Jobs' Flash-bad-HTML-5-good mantra usually don't understand what Flash Player is and what it does. (Same goes for the HTML 5 standard.)
Just spotted this, sorry.
My point about the 'clearly superior solution' was, I fully admit, based purely on the fact that HTML is a universal language, while Flash is a plug-in. But I'd appreciate any further background on the pros and cons of this issue.
HTML5 is the way forward
and not coming half fast enough if you arsk me.
Sometimes
You can view some YouTube clips but not all. I think it sucks personally. For the cost of the iPad you'd think all websites would work on it. I don't care if Apple prefer a standard which isn't standard yet. I wish I'd bought the Acer.
Steve Jobs
did a deal with Eric Schmidt (former Google CEO) to include non-Flash versions of YouTube videos on the site. (These use H.264 encoding and utilise the HTML 5 <video> tag, both of which are available in the Safari browser.)
My guess is that embedding a YouTube video in your webpage is only possible via Flash Player.
More complicated
The answer is more like: it depends. Some youtube vids are available in a number of iDevice friendly mp4 variants. YouTube's web APIs let you get hold of available videos in the appropriate formats. Browser extensions are available that will quite happily let you download mp4 video from youtube and save it, but only if the videos exist encoded in that form. Some are only available in the FLV flash format, which is more easily embedded in the flash video containers youtube use sometimes. You may also find some videos available in Google's WebM format. I say sometimes because youtube have been doing work with an HTML5 friendly format which lets you watch movies without flash.
But even then it's complicated. The HTML5 standard isn't actually even a standard yet, so the codecs for HTML5 video are a bit of a free for all right now, with three broad standards: the Open source Ogg (Theora and Vorbis), supported by Firefox but not by Apple or Microsoft and sort of by Google via WebM; Apple's H264 mp4 (with its associated licensing issues, hence no Firefox support but, oddly enough support on Microsoft's browsers) and Google's WebM codec, which tries to reconcile some of these issues. Chrome doesn't support H264 either.
If you're a developer looking to support HTML5 video you can get away with specifying multiple formats but it's all a bit of a nightmare right now.