Thursday, April 18, 2013

Why Is The Video Missing When I Read Your Blog On My iPad?

Flash Video and iOS

This exciting website is brought to you courtesy of "Blogger", Google's simple blogging service.  (I also use them to host my personal stories both here at at SayUncleGeorge.com.  Recently I discovered that my embedded videos were not displaying properly on iPad and iPhone.

You may know that Apples mobile devices do not display Flash video -- and for good reason.  (Flash is a major cause of computer crashes and its processor-heavy code quickly drains other battery-powered tablets.)  Their alternative is to present video using something called "HTML5".

When I first started writing, Blogger's built-in writing tools inserted YouTube videos that seemed to play universally.  What happened?  Maybe because Google's "YouTube" app was not built-in to the latest version of the operating system for iPhone and iPad (iOS6)?  Maybe because the source video that I uploaded to YouTube was a format that Apple dislikes?  Maybe (music) content owners blocked it?  The reason doesn't matter as much as the need to fix the problem!
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Obviously I am not a web design expert, but I have figured out a workaround.  It takes a bit of extra work to embed special code, but beginning today all new posts should display universally.  I will also go back and update older posts as time permits.  The result should be something like this:

(old way) Using Blogger's Video Insertion Tool, result = sometimes Flash Video:



(new way) Using Embedded HTML Code, result = HTML5 video:


I hope this works out for everyone.  (And if you happen to read this and can shed some light on the technology, please let me know.)


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