Is there a compatible way to serve videos to mobile devices?

Question

I was wondering how to embed a video on a webpage to have it compatible with mobile devices. I am kinda new to the whole mobileweb. So I set up some testing pages and tried them out with some devices of my friends. Flash is obviously not the way to go. Embed tag neither. html5 video tag neither. I also tried to nest them for fallback compatibility but just didn't get it right.

So I had a look at youtube. They are using rtsp streams and they just let the device handle the rtsp:// links. This seemed to be working everywhere, and I think they do it for a reason. So I had a look at rtsp protocol the possibilities to serve such a stream. Turned out its really simple and doesn't really differ much from the http protocol. There is e.g. ffserver out there for that.

But every free/os implementation seems to be testing/buggy ...

So I ask you guys. I cant be the first stumbling across this problem.

Isn't there a nice tested way to embed videos with nice compatibility for mobile devices? preferably served from a http source!

Answer 1

We just had a customer, Lon Sobel, work up something like this. Lon writes :-

Thanks a million for this. I created a website for my Tax Class at Southwestern Law School in Los Angeles (tax.carolon.net). The site contains Flash animations that won't play on iPhones, iPads or most other mobile devices. I'm using Handset Detection to redirect my iPad/iPhone-using students to a site that links static "poster" images to YouTube. Handset Detection works great!