Video playback capabilities in iOS and Android

3
votes

I'm in the stage of planning a new application for both iOS and Android platforms (tablet and phone), which will heavily feature streaming video playback.

However, the documentation is not entirely clear about capabilities of these platforms when it comes to video playback. So my questions are:

1.) Can Android and iOS playback HTML5 video from a webpage/webview?

2.) Can HTML5 videos be shown as part of a webpage (non-fullscreen) with an overlay?

3.) Can Android and iOS play videos natively in non-fullscreen mode?

4.) Can I do text/graphcs overlay over a played video if it's a part of native app?

The answers on these questions (if possible, with supported OS versions) would be much appreciated, I can't seem to find conclusive resouces as part of the platform documentation.

2
androidioshtmlvideo

2 Answers

3
votes

Ok let me try to answer as clear as possible since I just had experience with apps for streaming in ios and android.

1.) Can Android and iOS playback HTML5 video from a webpage/webview?

Yes The both can with the <Video> tag

2.) Can HTML5 videos be shown as part of a webpage (non-fullscreen) with an overlay?

This depends more on the device than on the OS. iPad can do it without full-screen but iPhone does apply full-screen, Android Tablets Can some Andorid phones Can't.

Specifically on iOS and iPhones the best way to go would be to create a MPMoviePlayerController (not to be confused with MPMoviewPlayerViewController) and you can set the layout in your viewController and restrict the size of the video so you can see the layout. (This allso works of course in iPad so that could be your best approach for both)

3.) Can Android and iOS play videos natively in non-fullscreen mode?

Yes they can, as explained above would be better if instead of using a WebView you use VideoPlayer's in View Controllers

4.) Can I do text/graphcs overlay over a played video if it's a part of native app?

You can using the above approach since your video will be on your viewcontroller where you manage the size and position of the player in your view, when doing it on a webviewthe device automatically loads the player so you are unable to manage it.

You should play safe and go for min OS requirements iOS 4.0 and Android OS 2.1 because of the improvements both versions made on native video playback

1
votes

I don't think there can be a definitive answer without testing and even then the answers are likely to change (rapidly, I hope). I looked at the reference video here: http://broken-links.com/tests/video/ which is encoded in three different forms, ensuring it can play correctly in Firefox, which supports ogg, Chrome, which supports webm, and whatever supports m4v.

<video id="video" autobuffer height="240" poster="../images/bbb_poster-360x240.jpg" width="360">
  <source src="../media/BigBuck.m4v">
  <source src="../media/BigBuck.webm" type="video/webm">
  <source src="../media/BigBuck.theora.ogv" type="video/ogg">
</video>

I tested this on an iPad 2 with the latest updates, a Samsung Galaxy Tab with Android 3.1, and a Nexus One with Android 2.3 as well as Firefox 5 and Chrome 12 on OS X 10.6.8. Both Firefox and Chrome played perfectly.

Ipad 2: Played correctly in the browser (non-fullscreen). The only anomaly: time was shown as "1' of NaN'"

Android 3.1: Played correctly in the browser (non-fullscreen.)

Android 2.3: Went to full-screen when I pressed "play." After playing, went back to in-browser, but showed time as "1' of 6000'" Also, it hung for a while before playing, perhaps because of the connection speed, but it didn't feel completely stable.

I hope this is helpful.