Adapting existing web sites for iPhone/iPad

FREE JWPLAYER HANDLES BOTH HTML5 AND FLASH

I've begun using the free JWPlayer http://www.longtailvideo.com which can handle playing both Flash & HTML5 files to play videos on my sites.

Longtail also has a paid version of the player that you can re-brand, and offers some other interesting add-ons.


Together, they support media on both the iPod/iPad platform as well as more conventional platforms.

The implementation is pretty straight forward and you can read more on their site.

Longtail recommends that you convert your(existing) videos to an .mp4 format so that you don’t have many different media file types to deal with.

I've been outputting the video files in Premier Pro CS5 but am looking for a good, inexpensive (or free) converter to convert .flv to .mp4. There are a lot of converters to choose from and I'd appreciate a recommendation.

Back to the JWPlayer...

First I needed to download the player and other necessary files from their site.

Note: If you don’t want a “share this video” page to come up at the end of the video, don’t forget to uncheck the “include Viral, a video sharing plugin” check box.

After uploading the swfobject.js, jwplayer.js, and player.swf to your site. (If you don’t upload them to the root directory, change the path’s below.)

Insert this code in the head of your page:

<script type="text/javascript" src="jwplayer.js"></script>

Then, in the body where you want the player to appear:

<script type="text/javascript">
jwplayer("container").setup({

file: "yourfile.mp4",
height: 480,
width: 720,
image: "a_still_image_to_display_while _the_video_is_loading.jpg",
autostart: true,
modes: [
{ type: "html5" },
{ type: "flash", src: "player.swf" }
]

});
</script>

The modes: code makes sure that html5 is tried first and if it’s not compatible with the particular platform, then flash is tried.

I left out the <div id="container">loading the player...</div> because it was optional and causing problems.

Jerry Kornbluth