[whatwg] Serving up Theora <video> in the real world

[Ralph Giles]

On Thu, Jul 9, 2009 at 3:34 PM, David Gerard<dgerard at 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