Facebook transcodes video for iPad

Flash is just not doing well when it comes to Apple.  With no Flash support in site, there was lots of speculation on what would happen with Facebook.  There are LOTs of videos on the popular social networking site, so how was anyone going to view them, especially if they wanted to use their new iPad?  It was suggested that Facebook was using HTML5 for its video now, but this is not the case.

According to ReadWriteWeb, Facebook stated that, “All new videos are encoded in h264 format, so we’re playing videos natively in the iPad since it supports h264-encoded videos. It will load them full-screen, similar to what it does for YouTube videos.”

So no to HTML5, and yes to  transcoding the original video format to MP4 on the fly once the Safari browser is detected. Facebook quietly rolled out the new system a week ago and at present only new and recently uploaded clips are viewable on the iPad.  There is no word on if they will be re-encoding older videos on the site.

Related Posts

Advertisement