Yesterday was a pretty big day for the TMC Newsroom as we made some upgrades to how our videos are displayed on iPads, iPods and iPhones. If you are an iPad user you may have noticed that videos play on our video page without the need to open a standalone player. This is similar to how they play on a PC or Mac but there is a slight difference as these machines run Flash. Since iPads do not, we now check for the browsers ability to embed a QuickTime player and if it exists we play the video via the embedded QuickTime player with an H.264 stream.

Another upgrade to our videos comes in the form of our embed code which accompanies our video library. Similar to what YouTube allows, you can embed any of our videos into any web page such as a blog. We have now modified the code to use an iframe which means that the video will show up on iPhones, iPads and iPod Touch devices. Prior to this time the embed code showed up as an empty space.

In theory this video below with the new TMC embed code should show up on all Apple devices. This is my first post with the new code.

You may recall that back in April we upgraded our videos from Flash to H.264 so they would display on the latest Apple devices. Actually it would be more accurate to say we duplicated the files and now keep one in each format.

This additional work has to be done by millions of sites and I have referred to this productivity sucking endeavor which is the result of having no Flash support as the real Apple tax.