HTML5 inline video on iPhone vs iPad/Browser

Question

Hi,

I've created an HTML5 video player (very simple) that works perfectly on the iPad and the browser.

However, when I open it on the iPhone, I only get a play button which, when pressed, opens the native video player on a new window, on top of all my stuff.

That means I lose access to my custom controls and time tracking (written in Javascript), since the video is now running isolated.

Is there any way to override Apple's control of HTML5 video on the iphone and get it working like on the ipad?

Cheers

Answer 1

Do you have an app created or is this for mobile safari? If you have an app and use UIWebView you should set UIWebView's allowsInlineMediaPlayback property..

Answer 2

Right,

I was going nowhere with this and filed a bug with Apple.

After a couple of weeks they got back to me saying, very simply, that I should add "webkit-playsinline" to the video tag on the HTML, as well as adding the "allowsInlineMediaPlayback" property on the UIWebView.

So in the end, this is what it looks like:

HTML

<video id="player" width="480" height="320" webkit-playsinline>

Obj-C

webview.allowsInlineMediaPlayback = YES;

And all works just fine :)

Hope this helps someone, as it's virtually undocumented and the only place I could find a reference to "webkit-playsinline" was in the iAds reference, where it says: "iAds JS only".