Cascades Development

[rnickel]

I'm trying to integrate a better YouTube experience into our app. Right now the only way that I can get the application to play videos is by invoking the media player with an RTSP stream. Unfortunately the quality on these videos is TERRIBLE. It was acceptable 10 years ago for my flip phone, but not for a BB10 device.

I have attempted to embed the video in the webview, however when trying to play the video I'm ALWAYS shown an error. You can reproduce this by embedding the following code into a webview: 

<iframe width="560" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/QZuOKUrwoys" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>

This is YouTube's preferred way to play videos within an application.

On the iOS side we were able to alleviate this issue by setting the base URL to http://youtube.com and the videos play as expected. This doesn't seem to work for the BB10 webview unfortunately.

Any ideas?

[s_rashid]

Hello,

Unfortunately, at the moment, the WebView component within native apps has limitations in terms of HTML5 Video, Flash and iFrame. However, you should be able to make a proper BlackBerry 10 YouTube app using WebWorks or AIR runtime. In that way, you should have access to the higher streams. For example, in AIR, you can acquire a MediaPlayer object; set the content ID (the unique ID of the video on YouTube be played, which you'd acquire via YouTube API).

We would also recommend to log a feature request for the native WebView component to support the desired features. It will help us to request for the changes with the development team(s). You can file feature requests here:
https://www.blackberry.com/jira/secure/Dashboard.jspa

Thanks,
Rashid

[rnickel]

Unfortunately re-writing our entire application out of cascades and into Air is not an appropriate solution.

I have created a bug for this and I hope it gets addressed quickly.

[s_rashid]

Yes, it is an unfortunate limitation right now for Cascades WebView; we are trying to escalate it with the internal development teams. 

However, I should point out that as a temporary solution (although a very poor experience), you could just invoke that particular YouTube URL with the browser app to do the the playback (just for now, until the Cascades WebView supports it natively).

Cheers,

Rashid

[bbquincar]

@s_rashid I have a similar issue where my whole app is based on webview and has websites with embedded YouTube videos. How would I give the consumer the ability to see them. Even if played outside my app.

[s_rashid]

@bbquincar,

Are you asking how to invoke the browser app with a specific .html file or a URI? You should be able to do this invocation like any other card invocation. I'm assuming you already checked out some of the public resources/sample apps for invocation?
For example, here are some: 

• InovkeClient (source/project): 
  https://github.com/blackberry/Cascades-Samples/tree/master/invokeclient
  
  
• Invoking the browser: http://developer.blackberry.com/cascades/documentation/device_platform/invocation/browser.html
  
  
• Documentation for invocation framework, cards etc: http://developer.blackberry.com/cascades/documentation/device_platform/invocation/index.html

Cheers,
Rashid

[bbquincar]

No I know how to do that check out launch codes its a free app but videos in the webview don't play nice understand BlackBerry is looking into it. With my app just pulling up webview is there a way to still watch the video when selected maybe pushing to invoke when the YouTube video is selected. It's part of the browser.

[Kaz32]

Hi, is use iframe tag on webview still not available on cascades?

Thanks

[s_rashid]

Hi Kaz32,

Note that the issue was the support for the HTML5 Video tag within the Cascades WebView. iFrame tags should have been already supported separately (as it should be now).

Starting with the latest 10.1 OS versions, you should be able to embed the HTML5 Video (with iFrame) for YouTube as well. But the design/implementation was such that it would take the user to a full screen video player, similar to what you see happen through the browser app, when playing YouTube videos. Are you seeing this is not the case right now?

Thanks,
Rashid