We had users reporting that the video playback wouldn’t work on their iPhones
and iPods. With a testers help we found out, that the video playback in our
Tricktionary iPhone app didn’t work on some iPod Touches and iPhones with 4.1
firmware (and probably older). The issue seemed also to be related to the
hardware as well, for instance 2nd generation iPods would not play the video.
The users were reporting that the video player would load, the controls would
appear, the progress bar would indicate playback, however the screen was blank
or black.
Was not easy to find out why exactly. Tests showed, that sample videos from
Apple worked when plugged in there, also the intro video was working most of the
time. We first changed the video encoding from H264 with MAIN 3.0 to Baseline
3.0 – this seemed to work at first, but we soon discovered that it would still
not work on iPhones or iPod Touches with FW 4.1 on. Scratching our heads, because
it was exactly the settings Apple suggested, we finally found out that the
problem was the encoder. Using Adobe Media Encoder CS4 before created the
not-working clips. Using Canopus Procoder with the same settings then helped the
issue, now the video features in our Windsurfing Tricktionary iPhone App are
working on all devices we could test them on (so far).
