hybrid app with mediaelement.js as media player

[Marcos_J_]

Hi all, I'm trying to create a hybrid version of a currently working web app which plays media content using mediaelement.js to provide compatibilitywith MP4, WMV and some other video formats we deliver.

My hybrid app is built upon JQuery, JQuery Mobile and mediaelement.js V2.14 (the most recent version AFAIK). I'm able to run it in my PC using a regular browser (IE10, FF and Chrome, all working) with MP4 and youtube-based videos, and they are played as expected. However, the same code cannot run on the XDK emulator (video player goes blank, player state remains idle and waits forever). After building our .apk file and installing onto an Android phone I'm able to run only MP4 videos with this device. If I access the original web site application (which shares the same mediaelement and player logic with my hybrid app) with this smartphone using Chrome or Android viewport,  Youtube videos are played as well.

So I think this might be some kind of incompatibility between mediaelement.js and the XDK environment. Is there any known issue with it, something to keep in mind?, has someone a working example of one app using mediaelement.js for playing Youtube contents? A living example with FLV and WMV formats would be of a great help anyway. 

Regards

[Barry_Johnson]

I would be very curious hear if you get any better results building with Crosswalk for Android if you have not already.

From looking at the browser & device support on the mediaelement.js site, I am skeptical you will get FLV or WMV working in a hybrid app.

http://mediaelementjs.com/#devices

[Marcos_J_]

Well, there is no difference  with Crosswalk, this seems to be a in-app browser-related incompatibility. I don't know what are the real differences between XDK browser and other browsers and versions that run on Android (I'm talking about Google Chrome and Firefox specifically), but these other browsers work with mediaelement.js just the same way their PC counterparts do.

Being more specific, I would want to know if a Cordova plugin is required for playing videos or  handling media player events and states (my gess is they are not needed, but I'm not pretty sure). The second question is about the usage of Adobe Flash Player plugin embedded into a hybrid web app, since this issue consists of a failure during the Flash fallback operation.

I agree with you: WMV and FLV formats are likely to be ignored (in fact, these files are downloaded instead of being played, but this was a scenario we considered on beforehand), but what we actually need is to play MP4 and other contents delivered as wrapped iframes such as Youtube and Vimeo, and to be able to handle all of them using the same control layer, functions and look&feel, this is the reason why we need to use mediaelement.js. So a working example should be welcome.

Thanks a lot.

[Barry_Johnson]

You didn't mention in your first message anything about InAppBrowser. Are you trying to run the mediaelement.js stuff in the XDK's web container or in some InAppBrowser you are spawning? If the latter is there a reason you couldn't simply launch a device's native browser?

In your recent reply you state "what we actually need is to play MP4 and other contents" in your first message you said you can play MP4 files. You also appear to acknowledge that FLV and WMV are not going to probably work. So what formats specifically are you trying to play other than these three?