Making HTML5 Video work on Android phones

I recently became the owner of an Android phone* and found that, despite it being listed as a feature of the browser, the HTML5 video element didn’t work for almost all of the examples I tried. I’ve just done some experimentation with this and think I’ve found a solution, so this post is offered in the hope that it helps anyone who may be tearing their hair out over the same problem.

From what I can tell, there are three requirements for video to work in Android browsers:

  1. You must not use the type attribute when calling the video
  2. You must manually call the play() method using JavaScript
  3. The video must be encoded as .m4v, not .mp4 Update: This is not correct (see below)

Update: This may be a specific encoding issue rather than all .mp4s; some .mp4 videos seem to play with no problems, others do not. Further update: The video type was a red herring; see my follow-up post, Encoding Video for Android, for more about this.

You can see this working in the demo attached to an older post of mine: Demo: HTML5 Video Controls With JavaScript. This works, AFAIK, in Android, iPhone and all video-enabled desktop browsers. The markup I’ve used is:

<video id="video" autobuffer height="240" width="360">
<source src="BigBuck.m4v">
<source src="BigBuck.webm" type="video/webm">
<source src="BigBuck.theora.ogv" type="video/ogg">
</video>

The first source element calls the video in .m4v format, without specifying the MIME type in the type attribute; I’ve tried both video/mp4 and video/x-m4v, and neither works. Omitting the type attribute altogether lets the video play, and seems to have no ill-effect on other browsers which play the .m4v file.

In order to play the video in Android, I also have an event listener in the JavaScript which plays the video when the element is clicked on, somewhat like this:

var video = document.getElementById('video');
video.addEventListener('click',function(){
  video.play();
},false);

I tested this on my own phone and an HTC Desire, and it works just fine on both. Hope this is of help to someone.

* It’s a Samsung Galaxy S, and I’m delighted by it.

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