TimothyW

I keep being told there's a "problem" with viewing videos on mobile devices. I can watch vids (YT) just fine on my phone. So where's the problem?

Yet... Mobile Video Made Simple : WebVideoUniversity.com
(not an affiliate link)

Please advise.

Thanks.

-- TW

Nail Yener

The problem is that different devices and mobile browsers handle videos differently and I guess they will not meet at a common point any time soon. The fact that you can view YouTube videos on your phone doesn't necessarily mean that every video on all websites can be viewed on all devices. I hope that makes sense.

Jay Moreno

As Nail rightly said not all browsers support the same video file formats. So you have to adapt the content you present to your mobile visitors.

Just FYI the only true video format that i find works on ALL mobile devices is 3GP... yes quality isn't great out of the box, but if you use Apple's QuickTime Pro to export them i have yet to have a problem with them across any device, even feature phones and older legacy phones. Look up on wikipedia and that's specifically what it was developed for - for mobile. Not only that its also offers progressive download and is lightweight.

So if you understand how to implement an adaptive approach you can ensure that your end user gets to see video regardless of the browser/device they are using.

For example the HTML5 video player gives you the option to add different types of video files - so if the first option is not compatible it falls back to the next file type. If the browser doesn't support HTML5 then it degrades gracefully and displays the 3GP video - that's how we have coded our Mobile WordPress HTML5 Video Player shortcode. We feel that this adds towards offering the best mobile end user experience.