Craig likes to ask questions via email. Whenever possible, I like to answer them in public places so that I can reference my answers when someone else asks a similar questions. This is from Craig's last email...
And in terms of help from you for next week the main thing I can think of is adding any Media Mover info for a format other than Flash to play well with non-flash smart phones so I can then start our Projects imports in earnest - I know you're holding out on me cos you have a Pre - but I didn't choose an iPhone, I was lumbered (ahem) with it.
Adding additional codecs is an option where new Open Media System installs have a big advantage over Denver. With more than 3,000 videos in our archive, adding another codec will take weeks to encode and take several GBs of storage on our RAID.
Adding new codec to Media Mover is easy, but there's a few things to consider before adding H.264 and/or Ogg. I wrote a bit about this in my why PEG should learn to love FFmpeg mega-post. H.264 works with JWPlayer (or other flash 9 based players), but that won't work for users with older Flash 8 (and even early Flash 9) players. If you want to encode H.264 instead of FLV, we'd need to modify the JQuery that wraps the .flv files it finds with the JW Player to both find the H.264 .mov files.
Ogg is a little different. It can't be played in Flash, but you can play it in Firefox 3.5 without a player. If you are using Firefox 3.5, check out the HTML5/Ogg version of Dailymotion or some of the HTML5 video demos (here, here, or here).
There are some technical issues with Ogg, but the biggest issue is the chicken before the egg. Users won't upgrade to a browser that supports HTML5 and Ogg until there is a reason. Content producers won't add Ogg support until a large percentage of users have browsers that support Ogg.
It is unlikely that Apple products will ever support Ogg since Apple holds some of the patents that make up H.264. This is a great summary of the codec wars past through Apple most recent work to get Ogg support dropped from the HTML5 spec.
If your goal is to get this to work on your phone, just adding an additional H.264 with a link to access that file is the way to go.
BTW, the Pre still doesn't "officially" support Flash or Ogg.
Comments
Developing a mobile app for community media
I am asking this as a layperson, not a developer, and not some one who is working day-to-day with the Open Media System (though I look forward to that one day).
Does any of the discussion of additional codecs for Media Mover open up discussion for mobile apps for the Open Media.
What would it take to develop an app for community media and does it relate to the Open Media Project?