Why do funnyordie.com videos work on iPhone?

[apockalipse]

This is kind of a random question, but I was just curious and thought someone out there might know the answer. On a desktop browser, funnyordie.com videos are flash based, yet they all open up on an iphone in the quicktime video player.

Can the iphone do some flash videos?

Is a conversion being made on the phone's software? I doubt this could be possible since it happens so fast.

Or does funnyordie.com have videos in multiple formats and recognizes the mobile device browser and sends the correct format?

As I said I'm just curious why these videos work and other flash videos don't. Thanks in advance if there are any experts out there.

 

[NeoMayhem]

Probably works just like seeqpod, which is flash on the desktop but uses quicktime on the iPhone.

 

[Zathu]

FOD looks for the User Agent string provided by your browser to render a different format in the page. If you do a simple user agent spoof with any desktop browser with the iPhone string, it will load the page with Quicktime rather than flash.

 

[msmallcombe]

The videos work because we detect the iphone's user agent and serve the video in H264 format (using the quicktime player) rather than FLV format (via unsupported Flash) - hope you enjoy the videos,

Mark Smallcombe
VP of Product & Engineering
Funny Or Die

 

[alexmarchuk]

The videos work because we detect the iphone's user agent and serve the video in H264 format (using the quicktime player) rather than FLV format (via unsupported Flash) - hope you enjoy the videos,

Mark Smallcombe
VP of Product & Engineering
Funny Or Die

I love when someone with a company joins a forum and informs us, thanks!

*just wondering, how did you find this thread? google search? lol*

 

[jakeacc]

Wow! This is great news. I love the videos on Funny Or Die. The ability to watch this on an iPhone is going to increase my visits to the site. (normally, I watch them at work and am always wondering if the video will be NSFW)

funnyOrdie on the iPhone has pretty much destroyed any chance of me using the YouTube app. I'm actually kinda bored with 95% of the stuff on YouTube.

Speaking of Apps, (and since we have the VP of Product and & Engineering on this thread), I think a "Funny or Die" App for the App store would be great. Plus, it would drive a lot more traffic to the website since I don't think a lot of people know that they can view the site's videos on the iPhone. (and right now, people are downloading every App in sight)

 

[marksman]

Glad this came up. I like to check out ForD but don't normally find time. Never thought it would work on the iPhone. Now I have something to do next time I waiting to get a spike removed from my brain.

 

[iTeen]

Very cool, I love it that websites actually take the time to do this.

Thanks much funnyordie.com

 

[w00tini]

Ya we're doing the same thing on our site (http://m.straferight.com/) for YouTube videos. Instead of showing the question mark, it creates a link to the YouTube client video with the title as the URL.

People have yet to touch the capabilities of what can be done when coding specifically for the iPhone browser. I can't wait till more of my fav sites get on board. The Facebook and Digg sites are two good examples as well.

 

[msmallcombe]

We'll have to check out the app store, it hasn't come up before but its a good idea. We have a Facebook app and it does drive some traffic.

You might be interested to know that all our other sites support the iPhone & iTouch so you can check out Tony Hawk's skateboarding site: http://www.shredordie.com & Tom Colicchio's cooking site: http://www.eatdrinkordie.com or watch some gaming videos at http://www.pwnordie.com with more to come (including a comedy site in Brazil later this month).