Saturday, June 4, 2011

iPhone, HTML5 Video & AWS: Movie format unsupported

I've been working hard on a website that will have a video section using HTML5 video with a flash video fall back. It has taken way longer than I ever expected. What a mess this has become, trying to support every browser's own format, and then trying to support old browsers on top of that. Yikes.

One particularly troubling part has been the iPhone/iPod Touch support for video. Using multiple video encoders (Miro, QuickTime Pro, and even Sony Vegas HD) I was unable to post any video on the web that did not cause the iPhone to say "This movie format is unsupported." And it was crap, because I knew it WAS supported. And, even worse, the video would sometimes work... randomly.

Well, after lots of pain and banging my head against the wall, I found it out it was because I was using HTTPS on Cloudfront. For some reason, iOS occasionally rejects the Amazon Cloudfront SSL/TLS. Nice.

So, just take the S off of the HTTPS when playing HTML5 video served from Cloudfront.

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