Delivering streaming video to mobile devices
Posted on Friday July 15, 2011 by Daniel Foster
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As you may know, the world of online video is going through some upheaval right now with at least two competing views of how embedded video should be delivered. And mobile video is at the center of the fracas.
Apple doesn't allow Flash--the technology commonly used by websites to deliver online video--to run on Apple devices such as the iPad or iPhone. Which is helping to drive the adoption of HTML5 as an alternate method of delivering video to mobile and desktop browsers.
Where does that leave content creators like us who just want to make sure everyone can view their stuff?
Not without options, fortunately. Here are some recommendations for making your video content more accessible on mobile devices for now. And remember, this landscape is constantly shifting...so pack your pioneer spirit. :-)
Best way to share video via a link
Easiest: Host video at YouTube
Use the YouTube presets in Camtasia to generate a YouTube-friendly video and upload it automatically. The H.264/MP4 video will play on the latest smartphones and tablets. On Safari for iPad, for example, when the viewer clicks through to view a video on YouTube, the video actually plays in the preinstalled YouTube app for an optimal viewer experience.
What about older-model Blackberries and other smartphones? YouTube also re-encodes your video into a legacy format (.3gp) suitable for playback on many older devices. The resulting clarity/legibility is something you'll want to test.
To direct someone to the mobile view of any video or channel on YouTube, simply replace the www part of the URL with the letter m. As in: http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=43OlYb7NARY. That link points to a video that should play on just about any mobile device.
Pretty easy: Put mobile-friendly videos on Screencast.com
Since Screencast.com was built by the same people who created Camtasia Studio, it offers some spiffy benefits for screencasters (for details, see this infographic).
Screencast.com will automatically use HTML5 to deliver your video to Flash-less devices like the iPad. BUT...Screencast.com does not re-encode your content, so you need to create it in mobile-friendly formats in the first place.
The video below shows how to download and use new Camtasia Studio outputs that produce smartphone-optimized content. To produce videos for playback on older-model Blackberry devices, you'll need to transcode your video to .3gp format before uploading (online filer converter www.zamzar.com will do a file up to 100MB for free). Then give viewers a link to both formats.
Here are links to download the production presets and other resources referenced in the video.
- Camtasia Studio Production Presets Download (.zip)
- Zencoder.com Blog - Encode video for mobile use
- Screencast.com - tutorial on mobile formats
- Camtasia Studio 30-day Free trial
- Camtasia Studio Learning Center - Free tutorials
Best way to embed video
You might want to upload videos to a hosting site and use embed code to display them in your blog post or webpage. But you want to make sure the embed code you're using won't block viewers who use Flash-less Apple devices.
The good news is that the default embed code generated by both Screencast.com and YouTube will serve up video to iPads and iPods using HTML5. Just copy and paste the embed code into your page or post...and viewers on Flash-less devices will see the HTML5 player.
For more on embed code basics, check out our video with tips and solutions to common embed problems.
Final thoughts
For all of these methods, you'll want to test them out to see if you need to reformulate the content to be legible at the smaller resolution. In other words, you may need to open up the project files and use Camtasia's SmartFocus feature to zoom in, use larger fonts in your callouts, that kind of thing.
Please let us know how these tips and new presets work for you...and share your own tricks for delivering video to viewers on mobile devices! Leave a comment on this post or find us on Twitter, Facebook, or our new Q&A forum.
Daniel Foster is the "social media guy" for TechSmith. He enjoys iceboating, ice cream socials, and isosceles triangles. Tweet him up @fosteronomo
Comments (5)
Thank you for the great article.
Please correct where I stray on the next statement.
If I understand correctly, YouTube queries the device asking for video and determines the OS. If it says blackberry, then the file is transcoded to .3gp for playback. If iOS, then the file is played in mp4 format. Could a method like this be put to use in a regular website?
I am searching for the secret of how YouTube plays on any device automatically, including blackberry.
This is a shortfall of every other video site I know of, including screencast.com
Posted by Paul | July 21, 2011 8:42 AM
Posted on July 21, 2011 08:42
Hi Paul, that is correct. YouTube sniffs the OS of the device and serves up the video in the correct format. I don't know whether it prepares a .3gp version in advance or is fast enough to encode it on the fly.
If you put the HTML5 embed code from YouTube on your website, it should also deliver 3gp video to Blackberry devices. This post has some additional details on how to customize that experience for viewers.
Does that help?
Posted by Daniel Foster
| July 21, 2011 10:18 AM
Posted on July 21, 2011 10:18
Yes that helps. I hadn't thought they may transcode in advance. Probably cannot do it on the fly.
The embedded file should play on blackberry.
My desire was to discover how to get video to play private files on the blackberry that I didn't want on YouTube.
Posted by Paul | July 21, 2011 10:26 AM
Posted on July 21, 2011 10:26
I'm in the midst of testing new mobile video options this morning, so, this was timely.
First, my experience with almost all YouTube mobile solutions has been that the cache'ing time is terrible. It's an awful mobile experience for most. And, depending on device reach you're aiming for, you miss a huge chunk of your potential market. Delivering to iOS means only reaching 10% of the mobile audience. Android doubles that, but, you're still not reaching the majority.
Enter solutions such as http://thirdpresence.com that deliver mobile video to 5000+ devices. Yes, it costs some money, but, the experience is exceptional. Limelight's REACH options is there too, more expensive but very high quality.
I'm testing other platforms as well - But, I will never use YouTube under their present configuration. Statistics are out that people leave mobile web sites if the page doesn't load in under :05 seconds. Show me one YouTube video that loads in that time frame?
The price of "free" is often expensive.
Posted by Sam | July 23, 2011 3:08 PM
Posted on July 23, 2011 15:08
i cannot work out with your way, is there anything wrong?
Posted by capture streaming video | March 3, 2012 6:57 AM
Posted on March 3, 2012 06:57