Need help about choosing the right way to support multiple players to play videos.

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Need help about choosing the right way to support multiple players to play videos.

I will try to be brief here....

I am working on a project where i need to support multiple players and platforms to play videos.

Major Platforms will be: Windows PC,Mac PC,Apple Devices and Android.

This is the precedence i will be following. First it will check browser support for Silverlight 3 or later then Flash then HTML5. If not any one of them is supported user will be asked to installed Silverlight..

I wanted to know which pattern and strategy i should use in order to support this functionality. Currently i have investigated about some javascript api that can do this detection on client side easily and load the player appropriately.. but as many of browser could be without javascript support so this method will fails to play videos..

Is there any way i can do this detection on server side and inject proper Player HTML on client end?

Regards.

AFAIK, client doesn't notify server that he has javascript disabled. So, the best you can do is ask them to enable js to play videos.

alxx 2010-08-26 05:56:58

+1 A:

Andrew 2010-08-26 13:35:10

quite helpful reply it is. I just need to clarify about precedence.. Should i lineup object tag for flash and below it i should insert object tag for silverlight and browser will show only one of them??? what if browser supports both silverlight and flash?

Shoaib Shaikh 2010-08-27 04:48:56

got it... its working fine..

Shoaib Shaikh 2010-08-27 05:38:41

one more thing.. i need to have a low quality version of videos for mobile devices.. how can i switch to low quality video version when a request came from some mobile device????

Shoaib Shaikh 2010-08-27 05:43:16

Glad that worked for you. Unless bandwidth is an issue, in most instances you won't have to worry about serving up a smaller video for mobile since most iPhone and Android devices are capable of playing back really high quality videos and making them look great. The only limitation I'm aware of is iPhones before iPhone 4 can only play video up to 640px wide. If bandwidth IS a concern, then it would definitely be easier to test for specific platforms as opposed to connection speeds.

Andrew 2010-08-27 13:42:47

For example, the PHP CSS Browser Selector can be easily altered to include calls for Android, but already has detection support for iPhone and iPod Touch built-in. Check it out here: http://bastian-allgeier.de/css_browser_selector/

Andrew 2010-08-27 13:46:28

Ya most of mobile device can play HD videos.. but my concern is what if there is no such wifi network available for mobile device and user uses EDGE network to access internet, in this case speed will be a real concern if i'll stream a HD version video on it. But Something like Browser select can help deciding which movie url to use.. i'll check it out soon..

Shoaib Shaikh 2010-08-28 14:53:29

ansaurus

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Need help about choosing the right way to support multiple players to play videos.

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