Web videos to smartphone
November 29, 2010 12:56 PM   Subscribe

Looking for a way to run videos from a website so they will play on a smartphone.

We have a short in-house created training video that is currently on our website as a simple .wmv file. The user clicks on a link and it runs in windows media player without any problem. It has now been requested that the video be reformatted so it can run on either an iPhone or Android phone from the phones web browser. The video has been converted into a 3gp file and added to the website, but when the tester with an Android phone (Droid X) goes to the page and clicks on the link for the file, the message comes up "sorry this video is not valid for streaming to this device". We have not tried testing it with an iPhone user yet but have the same video in .mp4 format.


Is there a way to stream videos to an Android phone? I am wondering if it has something to do with the actual .3gp file and the settings when it was converted from a .wmv file. Can anyone point me at a site where I find out or give me some instructions on how (if?) this can be achieved ?
posted by 543DoublePlay to Technology (4 answers total)
 
You want the video to be viewed through an HTML5 Video element. iPhones and recent-vintage (2.0+) Android devices will be able to stream it just fine.
posted by Tomorrowful at 1:02 PM on November 29, 2010


Best answer: This is a good start. Short version:

Mobile phones like Apple’s iPhone and Google Android phones support H.264 video (baseline profile) and AAC audio (“low complexity” profile) in an MP4 container.
posted by Oktober at 1:05 PM on November 29, 2010


Response by poster: Thanks! Reading now.
posted by 543DoublePlay at 1:33 PM on November 29, 2010


You can outsource this (streaming and all) to vimeo, where plus users can have mobile-ready versions of their uploaded videos prepared by default.
posted by progosk at 3:25 PM on November 29, 2010


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