No Viddler joy on the iToys?

Viddler has always provided successful video hosting solutions in my past experiences with them. I have not done much with them of late. Today ... I thought to finally get around to looking for a web based solution for hosting video. Since YouTube has fallen from grace on the iWorld, thought that perhaps Viddler may be an alternative.

On first glance through their site, things looked promising as they touted a new HTML5 option for embedded video that sounded as if this may work. Fired up DreamWeaver and some existing links and hopped into the embedded code to give a test run. One option proclaims to use HTML5 with a fallback to flash as needed depending on the platform. Initial tests on OS X Safari worked well, Firefox also worked well (although both of these were using flash). The iToys however proved to be problematic (thought they might as obviously flash will not be an option there with the much proclaimed mobile device support issues and the outright public rejection of the flash technology from Steve ...) with the test results on both IOS 5.1 and 6.0 showing only a picture of the video page and symbol overtop with a line through ... :-( (as in NO Support here).

This is curious as there is little overall feedback on their site for this topic. There was one post to suggest compatibility issues. Will continue to look for options. Perhaps there is a YouTube solution will prevail that may work better after all?

More to follow when time allows for additional research in this area ....

Here is my first update.

Wow was I wrong about YouTube.

With all of the recent "bad apple" press about dropping YT and such, it appeared they would be lagging behind. However, a quick search of YouTube reveals to all that they have the tools and the tools worked quite readily as documented along with ease of installation.

Here is a quick HTML5 iframe tag example to embed:

<iframe class="youtube-player" type="text/html" width="640" height="385" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/VIDEO_ID" frameborder="0">
</iframe>

YouTube has a quite different marketing model then the Viddler folks, but guess that is why they are "YouTube" and Viddler is trying to compete.

No response yet from the folks at Viddler about the problems with their interface (will posted when they do). But in the meantime the YouTube interface is up and working.

As a test I posted the first find today from a you tube search and fired it up on the iPad through Safari. Looks to play well without issues. Now I will need to transfer my videos from a pay service to a free service that works. So much for Viddler's business model. his is all kind of a sport anyways as I do not do much video web posting but it is there and wanted to see how this works.

Update number 2 ....

As I progressed with the direction found upon the initial views on YouTube, I found as usual, “the devils in the details”. For a quick embedded viewer, the YouTube player will be a good option. However there is currently on glitch discovered on the viewer in that “PlayLists” do not appear to work on the player in the iToys environments. From what I can tell, the YouTube development teams are aware of this and there should be a code fix solution in the future releases, so this does offer what appears to be the best long term solution. 

If one wants to build a list on their page to select specific videos to play (on iPad – does work on PC browsers), they will need to script this outside of the YouTube interface. Found some neat scripts are available to do this. Here is an example of one on github – This script will allow one to pass a list of the videos, display the play and select by thumbnail or text name which one to play.

I used this one on the web page I was building and it seems to have worked out quite well. Let me know if you need an example of this and I can share a link as requested.

Think the best long term solution will be to wait for YouTube player fix if you can as this advantage will offer a great and flexible way to manage the content simply by adding and deleting content in your defined playlist right through the YouTube site.

Good luck on your solutions and happy coding.

 

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Blogsy for iPad

This week I had the opportunity to test Blogsy for the iPad. The original version was somewhat buggy and I find the current release to be much improved in feature function and stability. Another plus is that I am now able to post directly to the Blogspot site so no more double conversions needed to accomplish this.

Posted a photo continues to work well as it did in the original tests. Will keep testing for the 14 day trial as agreed before publishing the final report and feedback to the team.

Is a nice feature to be able to publish on the go and not have be tethered to the desktop. Definitely makes the iPad case with attached keyboard come in quite handy as well. Still a pain to do heavy typing via the glass. The combination of the two areas (Keyboard & Blogsy) make the blogs much easier to accommodate on the run.

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