HTML5 video with Brightcove

8
votes

I currently have a working Brightcove Smart Player implementation, with Flash as the default and an HTML5 fallback where Flash is not supported (read: iOS). I would like to reverse this: prefer HTML5 video, and use Flash as the fallback. Is this possible, and if so, how? Brightcove seems to have entirely missed the point of providing an HTML5 option by using it as the fallback instead of the preferred format.

Additionally, although Brightcove announced plans to support WebM as well as H.264 18 months ago, it seems that the HTML5 player still only supports H.264. Firefox can't (and likely will never) support H.264 for patent (and, IMO, ideological) reasons. Firefox is used far too widely to leave out in the cold. Is there a way to serve WebM HTML5 videos to Firefox with Brightcove?

5
flashhtmlvideobrightcove

5 Answers

11
votes

You can force a SmartPlayer to display in HTML5 using the following parameter in the object tag used to embed the player in the page: 

<param name="forceHTML" value="true" />

The following Brightcove whitepaper explains their reasoning for defaulting to Flash and falling back to HTML5:

http://blog.brightcove.com/en/2011/01/html5-video-facts-fiction-new-whitepaper

To summarise, their argument is that limitations in HTML5 video (as of January 2011) mean that, in order to deliver certain key features to their publishers, Brightcove need to default to Flash and fallback to HTML5 for certain mobile devices (as counter intuitive as that may sound to some). The limitations of HTML5 video they cite are in the following areas:

  • analytics
  • advertising
  • content protection
  • live streaming
  • captions
1
votes

Chaps, to confirm, it's:

<param name="forceHTML" value="true" />

And not forceHTML5.

0
votes

In short, no I don't think so.

From what I understand, Brightcove delivers a Flash player to any browser that supports it (all desktop browsers). Flash supports H.264, not WebM. Furthermore, most mobile browsers are WebKit, so they support H.264. So obviously from a business standpoint they have little incentive to support encoding in WebM, regardless of what they said in the past.

More info: http://support.brightcove.com/en/docs/using-smart-player-api

0
votes

As of 7/24/2012, forceHtml5 won't force HTML5 if Flash installed.

However, I found a hack: If you overwrite the brightcove.checkFlashSupport function as well as use the "forceHTML5" parameter mentioned by @net.uk.sweet, you can force it. For instance:

if(brightcove.checkHtmlSupport()){
     brightcove.checkFlashSupport = function(){ return null; };
}

Clearly, this hack could fail if Brightcove changes their code, so use it at your own risk.

0
votes

Nevertheless adding param to object doesn't work, you can still easily do that as suggested by brightcove support http://support.brightcove.com/en/video-cloud/solutions/testing-html-players-desktop

Just modify your url too look like

http://<URL to the video>/?forceHTML=true