Video on iPhone (and other phones too)

Factual Questions
1

So I want to put videos on my website that can be viewed by smart phones. Owning only an iPhone myself, I’m not quite sure what files work best.

Right now, the videos are in .mov form, and play fine within the browser on the iPhone. However, if what I read is correct, that’s the only file type that’ll play within the browser itself. Now my first question is: will the .mov format work on other phones too (like the G1, Pre, BlackBerry’s, etc)?

If not, my only other idea is to link to the videos after uploading them on YouTube. Unfortunately, this means (for the iPhone, at least) that after the viewer watched the video, they’re returned to the main YouTube app and not my site, which they have to restart Safari for.

So I guess my second question is: is there a file format that works within the browser of most smart phones?

2

There’s no way youre embedding video into a mobile web page like this. Most smartphones cant play embedded video in web page; they need to use an external application, just like the iphone. Windows Mobile will need to run Windows Media Player and that only supports a handful of formats.

I dont think the non-apple smartphones can play mov files, as its patent encumbered and quite a CPU hog. Most phones are able to play video files like 3gp. Essentially, when you use your youtube app on the iphone youre playing a 3gp (or other mobile codec) formated file, not the native flash format. Also, Im guessing the .mov file on your iphone is not really a mp4 file its probably just another 3gp file. mov is a container, not a codec.

I think you’ll need to use 3gp or similiar. You’ll also need to figure out the proper video resolution. A video that looks nice on the iphone may be unplayable on a blackberry or windows mobile device because of screen size limitations.

3

HLF -
Br careful of your speculations. MOV is just a container. The contents can be video encoded with a variety of CODECs, including MPEG1,2, and 4, as well as many others.

The best bet for “universal video” would be something like MPEG-4 (H264) which is highly compressed and widely support - it’s a published standard.

4

I doubt a random sampling of cell phones will be able to play a mp4 file, even at a very low bitrate. Universal in the cell world is 3gp, not mp4.

5

While not a comprehensive list, this shows that all these smartphones can play h.264: http://wirelessphonereviews.blogspot.com/2009/06/smartphone-comparison.html

I would guess that any phone worthy of the moniker “smart” would play h.264, and trying to surf the web on a non-smartphone is pointless.

6

This is not true. Using your iPhone visit www.thedailycolumn.com, scroll to some youtube videos. Tap and play one. You will find that the video plays and immediately returns to the webiste. It all depends on how you embed the video. View the source of the said webiste on a computer and you can see how he embeds the youtube video.

With that said. The best format to encode in for the iPhone or any mobile device is the H.264 format. These will have the .mp4 or .mv4 file extensions. H.264 is Apples universal video format for their devices. It works for many other smart phones.

7

Hmm, I’ll have to check out the source code. Hopefully I won’t have to use the youtube-player image as the link.

Does YouTube work in the same way on other phones, like the G1 and Pre, if anyone knows?

And I did try the ".mp4 " extension, but my iPhone said it couldn’t download the file, for whatever reason.

8

When encountering a YouTube video on the G1, you click it and it opens the Youtube app, you watch the vid, and then hitting back will bring you back to the page.

9

Good to know, thanks.

Alright, so I took a look at the source code of www.thedailycolumn.com, and it looks like they’re using youtube’s standard embed code, as opposed to linking directly to the video, like I did. That’s cool, and it works, but it sadly won’t work for me.

I played around with the code a bit, but couldn’t figure out a way to make a normal link function the same way, without having to embed the Youtube thumbnail itself. Anyone know if that’s possible? If not, I might have to stick with either my current method of linking directly to youtube or using h.264 .movs.