I need to have an intro video for a site which I need to work on all browsers including safari on the iphone and IE6. I am thinking of trying to do flash with a html5 fallback or vice versa.
Has anyone had any experience of attempting this? I need to try and get a smooth a transition from the video into the content of the website as possible. Am not sure what limitations exist on the iphone?
I know intro videos aren't well liked but this is a requirement for the site.
EDIT -
One thing I would really like to be able to do is play video in page on an iphone automatically, while it is looking like it isn't possible I need to know for sure as I have been told it may be using some combination of canvas and video elements or wrapping the video element in some way. I was sent the following link
http://html5doctor.com/video-canvas-magic/
You need to stop and determine what's more important: Supporting a browser that is over a decade old or supporting a platform that is growing rapidly. That's really it. But if you continue on that line of thought, you'll learn quickly that you can't do HTML5 animations in any stable version of IE currently anyways.
So, you have two options. Develop in HTML5 and place alternative text in it's place for all IE visitors or develop in Flash and place alternative text in it's place for all iOS devices. Honestly, doing the same video twice (Flash and HTML5) seems like wasted effort. (Even with Google's new "Swiffy" SWF -> HTML 5 convertor, it's good, but it's not perfect and it doesn't support audio.)
If it was me in your shoes, I'd go with HTML5. IE10 is right around the corner and it supports animations. HTML5 is the new standard and that's the way everything is going. It seems like the logical choice to me.
Related
I ran into this problem in Safari where it appears that WebRTC is not fully supported. So when I call
navigator.webkitGetuserMedia()
I get an undefined error.
So my question to the community is what is the best way to write a Meteor app that captures Video on a mobile device and saves it on the said device.
If you have done this, I would appreciate it very much if you could share with me and the community how you went about this.
Specific Answer
The modern API is: navigator.mediaDevices.getUserMedia(constraints). See the docs here.
In the past, I've been unsuccessful with getUserMedia on iOS, but according to this post it can be done on iOS 11.
As for saving it, you can write to the browser's file system, but that API is only supported in Chrome. If you want to write to the camera roll, you'd need native code in the mix.
General Advice
I've spent several years of my life dealing with recording, uploading, and processing video using meteor. If you are doing anything more than trivial web recording, these observations may save you some time:
Chrome (on everything but iOS) has the best API for web recording. If you can require chrome for recording, that's ideal. Firefox is a close second, only because it doesn't support the file system API.
If you need to record and upload long videos on iOS, build a native app. Don't consider any kind of hybrid - that's a serious trap. The number of corner cases and things you need to check is pretty astounding, and the only way to get over those hurdles is with native code.
I want to build a facebook app featuring a personalized video which imports content assets from the user's facebook profile and their extended social graph and integrates these assets within the timeline. I am thinking of using Flash however a key stipulation is that the app works on mobile - and so I would need to use HTML5. My question is: Can I use Flash to build the application and then compile the app as HTML5 - or is there an alternative solution in the form of a HTML5 video toolkit with a programming layer that would allow me to build a web app / access the Facebook API?
I have done this a few times over the years and yes flash was the easiest however there are a few options which you have available to you that I know of which will be purely HTML5 based, personally I'd stay away from flash here as it will end up just getting int he way:
1- The cleanest method is to use a video compositing tool on the server side which can be programmed to accept variables. Personally I have only ever done this using ffmpeg however there a couple of alternatives which are out there.
The basic process would be to grab the media from FB then to composite them at certain point on top/below/around a base video which is sitting on the server using a shell script which you then pass the media assets to as variables. There are so many options as to how you might want this to be done, probably best id to have a look at some of these examples:
http://broadcasterproject.wordpress.com/2010/05/18/how-to-layerremix-videos-with-free-command-line-tools/
http://graphcomp.com/ffmpeg/
ffmpeg watermark without vhook?
note that last time I did this I used vhooks and custom filters, vhooks are now deprecated
This method will mean a reasonably heavy server load if your app is popular but it's probably the most robust across devices etc.
2- Use Popcorn.js, and let the processing be done on the client side. you could hard code it using css/js/html but popcorn is pretty stable although I havent seen how it runs on devices but in theory it should work (all standardized technologies). Basically the process would be to use javascript to fire the display of images overlayed on the video base file at preset cue points. Popcorn has all of the methods and means for you to do this already.
Hope this helps a bit. Good luck, sounds fun.
we realised some interactive video apps and one recent project was quite like your question describes.
We used adobe flash to track the motion - and published the project via create.js. You could have an image sequence from within create.js or put a video in a layer behind. This video would then control the player head time of the create.js motion tracked sequence via jquery.
worked fine - here a link to a testsetup with an image sequence.
Video Integration would be the next step.
http://www.jungeroemer.net/projekte/testpersvid/elftest01.html
(German text, sorry but it's nothing important to read there.
Just click the images and go for it)
you can download the sources from the link, if you need i can also upload the flash file to show you the motion tracking.
I'm building an iPhone app for existing site (a local news site)
Main page with articles headers, when click on them you move to the article page. Simple.
This is the first time I'm building such type of app.
I have 3 general questions, just to make sure :
For the iphone, Do we need to
re-create the website article's
pictures for the iphone ? or there
is some programming tool that on the
fly make the files looks better on
the iphone ? or maybe, there is some
technique that creates one artice
picture that looks right both for
the server and the iphone ?
Usually, Do you need to create
special data channels from the
iPhone webservice ? or programmers
just use the existing rss channels
of the webserver ?
If someone know nice artice about
this stuff, It will help a lot. just
see what other are doing.
thanks.
You can see the intent Media apps, these apps are working like what you want your app to.
1) You're better off creating mobile versions of the images. You can do image processing on the iPhone, but you'll have to have the original and that makes the whole thing pointless (ie. you have to download the whole thing.) Generate a mobile thumbnail when those are uploaded on the server.
2) RSS will do. There's a very good tutorial at cocoadevblog.com about approaching such a task (I guess this covers 75% of the work you have to do)
3) Check 2) ;-)
if your download image is bigger the the thumbnail you are trying to display,
then the problem is in your code that change the image size. check carefully what are you doing to the image after downloading it.
I would recommend to create square thumbnails of your pictures at the server level. This will allow you to easily position in the iPhone screen, plus you will not need to download the whole image from the server.
nnahum
How can I make my simple site, on which the user can choose to play a number of music clips by clicking on little "play" buttons on the page (think of Amazon's "preview" on their product pages for CDs), work on mobile devices?
[I originally created the page thinking only of desktop browsers, so currently it works by using Flash. I know that won't work at least on the iphone.]
Will I have to build a platform-specific app for all major mobile platforms to provide this kind of simple interface? If so, can you recommend a framework that will let me do this in "write once, run everywhere" fashion?
Many thanks for any insight!
~l
You can try: jPlayer
Recently a client asked me to make their site "work on smart phones", which normally wouldn't be too much of an issue... However it's a video site, and I have absolutely no idea where to even begin. Right off the bat I'm not even going to consider allowing the site to even function in anything other than Android (Maybe even 2.0+) and iPhone, maybe Blackberry and WinMo. But beyond that... What do I do? I'm looking at using the tag, however I'm unsure what, if any, codecs which phone uses. Is HTML5 even adopted in their browsers yet?
Could someone please point me in the right direction? Am I going about this the right way, using the tag? Or is there some magical html element both iPhone and Android (And BB and WMo) that lets them run video in their native video players (Like on youtube).
I have glossed over this book (Beginning Smartphone Web Development) - it looked very good re: what's special about small form factor browsers