Play video in full screen on Android with native video player

5
votes

I am trying to design a video website compatible with Android. A good example of what I'm trying to achieve is vimeo.com. They show a thumbnail of a video. When you tap it, the native Android player comes up in full screen:

enter image description here

Currently, I have an anchor to an FLV containing an h.264 encoded video:

<a href="video.flv">click here to watch</a>

When you tap the anchor on Android, it downloads the video rather than plays it. That's not what I want. How do I get it to play full screen in the native player like Vimeo? But unlike Vimeo, I would like the video to expand so that there's not so much black empty space around the actual video.

3
androidhtmlvideo
This question may be a duplicate. Have you looked at similar questions posted to SO? stackoverflow.com/questions/1711078/… – Nathan Fig
@Nathan Fig : That thread didn't show how to invoke a full screen Android player. – JoJo
on youtube, if you click a video it opens in full screen. I also wish to know how it is done. – Zibri

3 Answers

3
votes

Ahh I see what you mean, clicking a Vimeo video opens the Android dialog of selecting which app should respond to that request (in my case just the browser (which downloads the file) or video player (which opens and plays it as you wanted)). This is normal Android behavior- if you have not defined which app should respond to a given request, it will ask you to select from among the supporting applications.

Have you even tried embedding a video in the way suggested through the link I gave you? You may find that it will have the exact effect the Vimeo video does. HTML5 <video> element on Android

EDIT: Actually I think your real problem is probably just that the file format you're using (.flv) is not among the core media formats supported by Android. http://developer.android.com/guide/appendix/media-formats.html

0
votes

if you have the correct codec installed to play the video and doesn't work, check and make sure you have the correct mime types configured and that something in the registry or a file isn't overwriting.

use the old standard of defining mp4 and falling back to flash.

0
votes

In mobile Safari and Android webkit there are javascript methods and events defined on the Video object that can help with this. There is another StackOverflow question dealing with this topic (for iPad, but I have used this on Android phones as well).

Web App - iPad webkitEnterFullscreen - Programatically going full-screen video

Mobile Safari documentation: http://developer.apple.com/library/safari/#documentation/AudioVideo/Reference/HTMLVideoElementClassReference/HTMLVideoElement/HTMLVideoElement.html