There is nothing better than a little friendly competition, right? Mike came to me with the request to make his post a little more modular and into a javascript library that could be shared for the masses. Don’t get me wrong, I pretty much hate javascript unless it is wrapped by JQuery, but any opportunity to improve and take credit for another person’s hard work sounded too fantastic to pass up. So here is my update to Mike’s post — the BETTER way to implement video that is compatible with mobile phones, difficult browsers and HTML5-lovers/Flash-haters!

This was my first attempt at integrating HTML5 and I quickly learned that a number of quirks must be addressed when deploying video in this fashion. There’s nothing groundbreaking about this post; however, I’m hoping it serves to be a comprehensive summary of how to integrate HTML5 with the following criteria:

- Compatibility with all current browser implementations of HTML5 (H.264 and Theora)
- Flash fallback for older gen browsers
- Platform detection
- Mobile device support

The final result of my efforts can be viewed here by a Desktop PC or iOS / Android device: http://labs.byhook.com/html5video/

While in the midst of the some new rigid-body physics experiments (a continuation from my previous post on Jakobsen-style position based dynamics: (http://labs.byhook.com/2010/02/11/fuzzy-physics-3-1-rigid-body-dynamics-pt-1/) , the hooplah around the iPad and Apple getting all ‘The Hills’ on Adobe provided a welcome excuse for trying something with a completely different perspective. With the tech world’s lips aflutter and teeth agnashing about HTML5 and it’s impact on the web, we decided to use a couple days between projects to dig in and see how we could translate our Flash awesomeness to something a little more worthy of having a lower case i before it.