At the same times you can read a number of articles saying “Flash is Dead“, articles from ios users complaining “They can’t see some sites properly because of no support from Flash” and articles from Flash developers that HTML5 can never compete with flash.
In the middle of it all one day a developer completely unaware of the the political or technical reasons behind this is given a task to support videos playing on his intranet on ios devices as well.
Developer Story
Day 1 (The Excitement):
Oh Well I will learn to support videos on idevices.
Awesome man awesome it will be so much fun.
Day 2 (Moment of Realization 1):
Lets see why videos are not playing on ipad.
Though on my windows machine they play in all browsers.
It should be matter of minutes.
Lets search around it.
errr “Steve BABA” says
“Flash is not supported on iDevices” “HTML5 is the new Game”
My goodness but all my video files are .flv. What to do know?
There must be a workaround, Flash should be supported in some way?
I have been playing Flash Games since Childhood.
I will search the whole web and find out something.
Day 3 (Moment of Realization 2):
There is no workaround. I need to use html5 video Tag, So will video tag play .flv files? Not Sure lets try. Try but where Man I don’t have an IPAD to try? Ah- Non issue there should be simulator lets just try it there.
Day 4 (Understanding H.264 ):
No Results. Now what…
Oh Dont Worry i am the ninja.
i think i need to convert these .flv files.
lets search some more. What format they need to be converted into?
Oh thats H.264.
Day 5-6-7 (Alien “FFMPEG” enters):
let me figure out how i will convert the files through ffmpeg the supported exe in my system which converts uploaded videos to .flv format.What the heck i am stuck understanding ffmpeg, There is no proper documentation available and i am not very sure what i am searching for. Somebody rescue me.
Day 8-9-10 (Superman Returns) .
I am the son of Almighty. I am like superman i found the command line of ffmpeg for converting the video files into h264 format. I will create a script to convert existing files into this format. Will modify upload logic to convert uploaded videos to have h264 format.
Day 11 (It works It works).
I have figured out everything.
Lets just remove the hardcoding and replace it with the php script..
Yes it works it works.
Day 12 (The RTMP Mess)
Hey whats this RTMP thing.
Some of the my media url’s are having RTMP protocol why isnt it working.
Let me post this on Stackoverflow, There will be an answer soon.
Refresh Refresh Refresh After two hours the answer “RTMP not supported with video tag” Now what ? Should i search more ? Will read the file from the Server and output it in a php file, looks like there is no other option.
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Day 13 (The Browsers Mess) Ok it works on IPAD simulator, It works on Safari too. But chrome, mozilla and IE7 are having some issues. I think i would go with the old way in Desktop browsers and do it just for ios. Will figure the issues later. Let me just fix this.
Day 15 (Death is a Truth)
How can something go smooth in a Developers life.On Staging server on a real ipad. Its not working, Now what it could be how long will i keep searching and what should i search now? I am short of keywords. What is it? What is it?
Am i the most useless creature on this planet.
Day 22 (It works again):
