Does html5 video support flv out of the box on mobile phones(symbian,android,iphone)?

Question

The purpose is to support playing flv without requiring client side script like actionscript.

Anyone knows?

Answer 1

HTML5 video support is lacking at best currently. Many browser vendors each use different codecs (Safari/MS use H.264, Firefox Opera use Ogg/Theora). None of the browsers support the .FLV format to display video. .FLV and .F4V are the Flash Player's format. HTML5's primary intention is to reduce the need for plugins, so Flash Video is not part of the spec. To answer your question though: it depends on the mobile browser's implementation of the HTML5 specification and their selection of codec.

Answer 2

Nope.

I’m not sure if any phones support FLV at all yet. It’s only really really recent Android phones that support Flash at all I think?

Answer 3

I can say for sure that default browsers for phones running Symbian S60 5th ed., WInMobile up to 6.5, Android up to 2.1 does not support HTML5.

Answer 4

FLV is a Flash video format (or is it a container), and has nothing to do with HTML5. While a video format for HTML5 hasn't been agreed on, currently browsers support H.264 and Ogg Theora with Google recently open-sourcing the VP8 codec and packaging it up into the WebM container. Technically a browser could support flv via the HTML5 <video> element, but that's never going to happen. Browser support is thus:

• Firefox 3.6 - Ogg Theora
• Firefox 4.0 - Ogg Theora + WebM
• Chrome 5.0 - H.264 + Ogg Theora (WebM coming soon)
• Safari 4/5 - H.264
• Opera 10.5 - Ogg Theora (I believe WebM coming soon)
• IE9 - H.264 (supports WebM if installed by the user)

To answer your question, if you want to play .flv videos then you're stuck using Flash I'm afraid. If you want to take advantage of HTML5 video now it is possible to create an HTML5 video player that degrades to Flash support if the user doesn't have an HTML5 browser. It would mean converting your videos into H.264 and/or Ogg Theora, as well as keeping the flv ones handy, so you could potentially end up having to deal with multiple video files in different formats taking up drive space.

EDIT: I noticed you're referring to mobile phones, rather than desktop browsers, what I know is that Safari on iPhone supports H.264, Android supports H.264 (I'm sure WebM will make an appearance on Android devices), Windows Mobile 7 will likely support H.264. I'm not sure about the rest.