HTML5 inline video on iPhone vs iPad/Browser

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".

Until iOS Safari implements inline video support, you need to write video decoder in a web supported language. There are existing implementations of video decoders, such as Broadway for H.264 (video), jsmpeg for mpeg1, and ogv.js (video and sound support).

Keep in mind that the process of decoding a video is computationally heavy. Expect a relatively slow FPS (±20).

For your reference, these guys have prepared a demo of a video that you can play on your iOS device.