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We have a video website(stealth) for which we are planning to add offline play support for iphone, ipad, android and blackberry. Our desktop, in-browser UI works completely on flash. Our videos are all flvs and are streamed to the client side flash UI. These videos are also available as downloadable, offline videos.

Which is the video format/codec(flv? mp4? 3gp?) that has universal support from native video players on all/most of these mobile platforms, both from the point of view of playing it offline and streaming it online. As a last resort, we could always trans-code videos to multiple formats and stream the appropriate one for each of the platforms, but we want to avoid that if possible.

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closed as off topic by Matthew Read Feb 19 at 23:29

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1 Answer

up vote 5 down vote accepted

Use mp4 with the H.264 codec. Its small, fast and feature rich and it's supported out of the box by all three of the platforms you mentioned as well as being supported by most desktop players. Flash isn't supported on iOS devices or some earlier Android builds.

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+1 Not at all a coincidence is the fact that all 3 platforms can natively play YouTube videos without using Flash (normally via the YouTube app on Android and iPhone) and this is the format that Youtube push to mobile clients. Sticking to the same codec as Youtube is a pretty good bet for maximum compatibility, as device manufacturers would be stupid to release devices that can't play Youtube videos in this day and age. – GAThrawn Oct 21 '10 at 15:07

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