I asked whatwg for ideas on how to make this just work for iPhone users. The answer is sort of horrible. Any iPhone devs in the house?

- d.

---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Ralph Giles giles@xiph.org Date: 2009/7/9 Subject: Re: [whatwg] Serving up Theora <video> in the real world To: David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com Cc: WHATWG Proposals whatwg@lists.whatwg.org

On Thu, Jul 9, 2009 at 3:34 PM, David Gerarddgerard@gmail.com wrote:

Anyone got ideas on the iPhone problem?

I think this is off topic, and I am not an iPhone developer, but:

Assuming the app store terms allow video players, it should be possible to distribute some sort of dedicated player application, free or otherwise. I believe the fee for a cert to sign applications is currently $100/year.

However, the iPhone doesn't have a shared filesystem, or helper-applications in the normal sense, At least not as far as I can tell. The work-around I'm aware of is for site authors to check if you're running on the iPhone in javascript, and rewrite the video elements to normal anchors with a custom schema, e.g.

<a href="oggplayer://example.com/file.ogv">Click here to watch in Ogg Player</a>.

Then, if the user has installed the Ogg Player app, which registers itself has handling the 'oggplayer' schama, Safari will pass the custom uri to it, and it can download/stream/whathaveyou.

-r