

Ask HN: Can the iPhone play videos on websites? - kwamenum86

I know that the iPhone does not support flash but can it play videos using other technologies (ex: the HTML 5 video tag)?
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DarkShikari
The iPhone's video capability is extremely limited. I talked to someone
recently who was trying to stream video to the iPhone. The main issue is that
the internal video decoding API is not open, so you can't arbitrarily open it
up from an iPhone application and pass in a video stream to be decoded. You
can only open it on a full file.

One of the problems with this is streaming video. You can do video downloads
a'la Youtube, but that's because those fit the model: they are mp4 files with
a header atom at the front containing index information for the entire file.
You can't do this in live streaming, for obvious reasons. The guy I had talked
to basically concluded that it was impossible to view a live video stream on
the iPod with an ordinary application, since Apple's API was closed and the
built-in ARM CPU was an order of magnitude too slow to do the video decoding
on its own with a custom decoder rather than using the built-in decoder chip.

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aaroneous
The iPhone can play back h.263 and h.264 in 3gp, mp4 and mov containers.
<http://developer.apple.com/webapps/designingcontent.php>

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jgranby
Apart from YouTube videos, it can play some H.264 videos with its built-in
Quicktime player, which can be launched automatically from Safari. This is how
BBC's iPlayer (on-demand) service works with the iPhone/iTouch. I don't know
too much about what types of video are allowed, but this might help:

<http://www.apertureprofessional.com/showthread.php?t=2957>

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Anon84
A javascript flash player would be incredibly awesome... and tremendously
difficult, I imagine.

step 1: Implement a flash player in javascript

step 2: Dodge Steve Jobs personal assassination squad

step 3: Profit.

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kwamenum86
Has anyone ever profited from pure client-side js code? I am not even sure it
is possible.

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shutter
If you license it right, anything's possible. (i.e. major corporations can't
use your code illegally or they'll get caught.)

Just because the source code is publicly viewable doesn't mean anyone can take
it without permission; small people will, but the companies that would pay you
for such a thing can't get away with that kind of piracy.

~~~
kwamenum86
Yea, after I wrote that I thought of ext-js (<http://extjs.com/>). Good point.
I don't know what kind of money they are raking in because they are a js
framework but a client of mine bought a commercial license. Their framework is
ROBUST.

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cbarning
Adobe has developed Flash for iPhone, they are just waiting for Apple
approval.

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unalone
Yeah? And? Apple doesn't look like they'll be approving that any time soon.

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Morieris
No. I know of no method that works, other than YouTube videos.

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kwamenum86
I think a may have thought of a way to make it work...will post it on HN when
I am done if this thread does not produce any good answers

