« Youtube... Trials and Tribulations »

You'd think that embedding a simple YouTube movie would be, well… simple.

And it is, assuming that you only want it to work on desktop computers.  However, it's imperative that this site work nicely on iPhones, since I expect/hope that I'll be getting visitors from the App Store wondering what "Shape Search Zen" is all about.

So, in an ideal world, I'd like iPhone visitors to be able to see a video link, click on it, watch it full screen and then return back to this site. Everything except for the last item was fairly easy to do.  Not trivial, mind you, but not impossible.

The last one though was a royal pain, as almost everything I tried opened up the iPhone's YouTube App, played the video, then stayed in YouTube.  The user would have to quit YouTube and rerun Safari.  Admittedly, Safari would still be on the same page it was before, on the page with the original video link, but I really didn't like the idea of putting that disconnect between watching the video and hopefully returning to this site or the App Store to make a purchase.

The magic ingredient it would seem is FancyBox, a that opens up pictures and videos in a "lightbox" overlaid on the webpage. It's fairly simple to use, although easy to screw up too. The developer of FancyBox doesn't directly support iPhones and such (which might explain why it was so hard to discover as the solution to my problem), but it does 90% of what I needed, so I'm happy.

Except for one snag. None of the videos that I uploaded to YouTube would work.  What?!?  This lead to a number of hours experimenting with different settings and movie file formats.  Nothing.

Secret trick number two: mobile browsers can't access YouTube videos that are unlisted. It doesn't matter if you have the direct link to the video, they won't play. Even on the YouTube Mobile site, m.youtube.com, unlisted videos will not play. Setting the syndication setting on YouTube to share the video on mobile devices does not help.

Why, you might ask, was I leaving my videos as unlisted? It was just a temporary measure while I was producing and testing the Shape Search Zen trailer, I didn't want random YouTube folk watching my glorious work-in-progress.

So, anyway, enough! As you perhaps saw, the video is at the top of the post… fingers crossed!