Youtube mobile uses RTSP streaming, but thats rather overkill to set up and to maintain.
So it looks like HTML5 is probably the best way to serve videos embedded in websites to mobile devices. (Can I get confirmatino on that or does any one disagree?)
Also to include a static link to the media file so the phone can decide what to do with it and in edge cases download and start it with the system player, which seems to support more codecs and stuff.
The problem is the right video encoding.
I tried a lot and ended up with a video file that plays on Iphone 4, Iphone 3 with software upgraded and Android 2.1. Thats all I had available for testing.
To get it working at all the following seemed to be needed:
Format profile : [email protected]
Codec ID : avc1
The file also needed to be processed with qt-faststart
(which i don't understand because it adds more to the requirements as by default in H264 specification the video information is encoded at the end of the file.)
I searched a lot but with no luck, so my question is:
What settings to choose to support the most possible devices with still good compression, quality and stuff.
Will I be good with H264 (AVC) or will it be necessary to support an alternate source with webm/ogg or something like that anyway?
Or in other words:
If you put a video online in HTML5 to be served to mobile devices. What codec settings would you choose and why.
I will open other questions which I will partly answer myself and link them here on how to do:
- a compatible html5 player
- do flash fallback or the other way round
- how to server side encode the videos correctly includign requirement installations and various input files
Hopefully in the end I will have my video website all set up and ready for mobile and a comprehensive guide for everyone to do it as well.