Greg Schechter & Eugene Goldin — Mobile Meow: Bringing YouTube Videos to a Mobile World This is the story of the glory and struggle of bringing a high quality YouTube experience to the mobile web. Once upon a time there was a web developer who wanted to play videos on the web. So he filmed a cat and wrote a Flash and a HTML5 player. He spent many hours making it work on his favorite desktop browsers and even the one his grandfather still used. People could watch his cat video, he smiled, and the world was good. Then one day someone put a browser in a phone and soon there were many phones with many different browsers. This new set of environments were even harder to develop for and had a slew of new terrifying bugs. The web developer was miserable knowing people couldn’t watch his cat video. With much time and effort he figured out many of the secrets needed to combat the evils of the different mobile platforms. Once again people could watch his cat vid eo, he smiled, and the world was good. The end. Greg is a fearless web warrior, fighting for browser and website progress. While training at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign, he published articles with the Opera Web Standards Curriculum. Subsequently, he went on to battle alongside many different web companies, including Amazon, Yahoo, and Google. His current alliance is with YouTube, where he spearheads the movement for HTML5 video capabilities. Eugene Goldin is a javascript developer at YouTube. His interests include taking web videos where no video could go before, improving how users interact with web technologies, and long walks on the beach.

1. Mobile Meow
Bring YouTube to the Mobile Web
By YouTube's Greg Schechter and Eugene Goldin

2. Greg Schechter Eugene Goldin
The Web Warrior Code Crusader
schechter@google.com eugenegoldin@google.com

3. Video

4. Video

7. A Brief History

8. Video

9. Flash

10. <video>

11. Video

12. Playback Stats

13. Flash Native <video>

14. Flash
Flash
== Flash

15. Flash Flash

16. Native

17. Native
○ For fallbacks, use rtsp:// protocol (serving .3pg) if the
device won't support HTML5
○ Use custom protocol / URL scheme to launch your own
Android, iOS native app (no Windows Phone yet)
■ youtube://video_id

18. <video>

19. The Different Browsers
Safari Android

20. The Different Browsers
Opera
Safari Android Chrome Silk
Mini
Firefox Opera
IE

21. The Different Browsers
Opera
Safari Android Chrome Silk
Mini
Firefox Opera
IE
AMP LE
S

22. By brownpau at http://www.flickr.com/photos/brownpau/533267369/

23. How do we start
<video>

24. The Source
<video src="funny_cat_video">

25. The Source
<video src="funny_cat_video.webm/mp4/ogg">

26. Mobile Formats Support
Chrome Safari Firefox Opera IE Android
H.264
WebM Android 4+ Android 4+ Android 4+
HLS Android 3+
Platform Versions and Distribution

27. The Source
<video>
<source src="funny_cat_video.mp4">
<source src="funny_cat_video.webm">
</video>

28. Power

29. Power Consumption: H264 vs WebM
**fullscreen flash
**windowed flash
Research done by Yossi Oren For more information visit http://iss.oy.ne.ro/

30. Stick it in a page

31. Basic video tag
Safari
○ Renders a thumbnail poster and play button (flaky)
○ Background is set to black and cannot be overwritten
○ If a parent element has display:none set at any point the video fails to
playback properly
Opera
○ Gives video dimentions black background if the information is
available
○ Has issues with stretching WebM
IE and Android
○ Play button/film icon for all video tags regardless if browser can play
the format
○ Background is set to black/grey and cannot be overwritten

32. Give it a poster and click it

33. Poster Attribute
Use the poster attribute to get a thumbnail
Safari, Chrome, Android, and Opera
○ Preserve aspect ratio of poster image
IE and Firefox
○ Stretch image to size of video tag
IE
○ Keeps poster as paused state
All Others
○ Replace video with the paused frame

34. Basic video tag
Chrome
○ Default click to toggle play/pause
○ Remove with an empty onclick handler
Safari
○ Will launch any supported video with or without an onclick handler
Android and IE
○ Shows click interactions but does not play with empty onclick

35. Basic video tag
Pro tips:
○ Create your own cued state to convey you can play the video
○ Set the background color to black for continuity across platforms

36. Controls
<video controls>

37. Controls
Chrome Safari Firefox Opera IE Android
Play/pause
Button
Volume Only in Mute toggle Don't work in
Controls Fullscreen only Android 4
Seek bar
Fullscreen Button Gesture Button
button
Playback Both Fullscreen Inline only Determined Fullscreen Both
Type only by hardware only

38. Custom Controls
● Preserve your brand
● Unified experience across platforms and
browsers

39. Custom Controls
Lets get some custom controls

40. Custom Controls
● Allows us to expand the set of controls and add our own
○ annotations
○ playlist
○ captions
○ more

41. Custom Controls Pro Tips
● User expect to be able to drag the progress
bar
○ Need to remender to prevent scroll on touchstart
● Volume can't be set everywhere and users
are accustomed to using device controls
○ So don't build controls for it

42. Custom Controls Pro Tips
● Fingers are fat
○ Average finger is 11mm so make targets at least
40px with 10px padding
○ Use SVG's so icons can be scaled and shared with
desktop application
○ Do what you can in css

43. Custom Controls Pro Tips
● Don't trigger content with hover
● Fullscreen
○ The browsing context is always fullscreen so fake it

44. Fullscreen

45. requestFullScreen

46. requestFullScreen
● Desktop Only
○ Firefox, Safari, and Chrome
○ Vendor Prefixed

47. What about Mobile?

48. Isn't it already fullscreen?

49. Yes (sort of)

50. Mobile Fullscreen
● Open New Tab
● webkitEnterFullscreen
■ Webkit only
■ Video element only
■ metadata must be loaded

51. Mobile Fullscreen
● Open New Tab
● webkitEnterFullscreen
■ Webkit only
■ Video element only
■ metadata must be loaded
● Pro Tip: Remember size context
changes so use viewport to scale
icons and controls

52. @viewport { width: device-width; }

53. autoplay
<video autoplay>

55. autoplay
In Safari on iOS (for all devices, including iPad),
where the user may be on a cellular network and
be charged per data unit, preload and autoplay are
disabled. No data is loaded until the user initiates it.

56. What about everyone else?

57. Autoplay
Chrome Safari Firefox Opera IE Android
Attribute
Scripted Buggy

58. autoplay

59. autoplay
<video onclick="this.play()">

62. autoplay
function someClickEvent(evt) {
// In a user initiated thread.
myVideoElement.load();
getVideoData(); // Triggers an ajax call.
}
function onGetVideoDataReturned(data) {
// Not in a user initiated thread.
setVideoElementSrc(data);
myVideoElement.load();
myVideoElement.play();
}

63. autoplay
function someClickEvent(evt) {
// In a user initiated thread.
myVideoElement.load();
getVideoData(); // Triggers an ajax call.
}
function onGetVideoDataReturned(data) {
// Not in a user initiated thread.
setVideoElementSrc(data);
myVideoElement.load();
// For Android
window.setTimeout(function() {
myVideoElement.play();
}, 0);
}

64. Embeds

65. Embeds
<script>

66. Embeds
<script>
○ We need our content to be sandboxed
○ More than just a video tag

67. Embeds
<script>
○ We need our content to be sandboxed
○ More than just a video tag
<object>

68. Embeds
<script>
○ We need our content to be sandboxed
○ More than just a video tag
<object>
○ Can load content with the data
attribute
○ But no way to interact with it via
JavaScript

69. Embeds
<iframe>

70. Embeds
<iframe>
○ Allows our content to be sandboxed
○ JavaScript API communication

71. Embeds
<iframe type="text/html"
width="640"
height="385"
frameborder="0"
src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/VIDEO_ID"
allowfullscreen>
</iframe>

72. Embeds
Pro tip: Plan for the future (if you can)
<iframe type="text/html"
width="640"
height="385"
frameborder="0"
src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/VIDEO_ID"
allowfullscreen>
</iframe>

73. Embeds Pro Tips:
html {
/** Hack to fix iPhone resizing. */
overflow: hidden;
}

74. Embeds Pro Tips:
body {
/** Dymanic Resizing **/
background-color: #000;
height: 100%;
width: 100%;
/** Remove highlight when use clicks **/
-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0);
}

75. Testing

76. Testing: The Old Fashioned Way
● Device lab
○ accurate
○ costly
○ space inefficient
○ boring

77. Testing: With Software
● Hardware Emulators / Simulators
○ available for major systems
○ approximation varies
○ still boring
● Android Emulator
○ bulky, slow, no video codecs
● iOs Simulator
○ both tablet and phone

78. Testing: With Software
● Browser Simulators
○ Poorer approximation
● Opera Mobile Simulator
○ missing video tag support
● Fennec (FF) Simulator
○ poor touch control mapping
○ sends desktop user agent

79. Testing: Automation
● Selenium!
○ use with simulated or real devices
○ not boring

80. Testing: Automation
● Android Webdriver
○ Still no video support
● iOS Webdriver
○ Need to register as ios dev
○ Intermittent issues with playback
● IE
○ No webdriver APIs for mobile

81. Testing: Automation
● Chrome, Opera
○ Driver APIs built-in
○ Remote debugging
● FFMobile
○ No webdriver APIs

82. Testing: Automation Strategy
● Test API methods in mobile context first
○ cheap
○ can approximate video playback by video.
currentTime

83. Testing: Automation Strategy
● More sophisticated tests to follow
○ screenreader
● Screen cap processing
○ check for distortion
○ playback accuracy

84. Testing: Automation Strategy
● Screen cap processing

85. Testing: Hardware Assistance
for more information check out http://bitbeam.org/

86. The Future
Cats in Space by WF&TD

88. Or

89. PointerEvents
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ie/hh673557(v=vs.85).aspx

90. http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/in_ur_reality.png

91. Track
<video>
<track src="cats_meow" kind="subtitles">
</video>

92. Camera Access with
getUserMedia

93. More to learn
● HTML5 Video Spec
○ http://dev.w3.org/html5/spec-author-view/video.html
● Browser Blogs
○ http://dev.opera.com/
○ http://hacks.mozilla.org/
○ http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ie/
○ http://peter.sh/
● Documentation
○ https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/
● Other
○ http://developer.apple.
com/library/safari/#documentation/AudioVideo/Conceptual/Using_HT
ML5_Audio_Video/Device-SpecificConsiderations/Device-
SpecificConsiderations.html

94. Questions?
can haz question?
By cloudzilla http://www.flickr.com/photos/cloudzilla/378829651/
schechter@google.com
eugenegoldin@google.com