Hi Gary (and everyone)
As we know that iOS doesn’t support flash from Adobe and you tube site use Flash as the main way to play videos (and some are available in html5)
But, I am wondering that how or what methos or what kind of technology that youtube application use to play the videos. I am not sure but I dont think it related to html5, because youtube app can play all the video but there are a lot of videos Can only be played under flash mode.
Any explanation.
Thank you very much.
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Kai Liao
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What Kind Of Technology Does Native Youtube Application On iOS Use?
Comments: 3 Responses to “What Kind Of Technology Does Native Youtube Application On iOS Use?”
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Nothing special. All YouTube videos are encoded on the YouTube servers in h264 format. That's a type of MPEG4 compression.
There is an alternative to using h264, called flv, which is a Flash-playback-only type of streaming file. But since Flash plays back both h264 and flv now, I think that YouTube is just using h264. Though it really doesn't matter to us as viewers.
On the web on a Mac or PC the YouTube web site usually uses a Flash player to play back that video. But you can also view it without Flash by using HTML5 tags to play back the h264 video that way. Not as many features as the Flash version, but it works fine.
The YouTube app just plays that same h264 video. Though like on the web, it really doesn't matter to us as viewers. Flash is a plug-in for browsers. HTML5's video playback feature is just functionality built into newer browsers.
I think its the H.264 same as the newer Flash player plays, but done by iOS. This seems a nice write up on variations http://www.niallkennedy.com/blog/2010/07/h264-video.html
Thank you Gary (and everyone) for your explanation.