Re: iOS6 WebVTT TextTrack Support in Safari

On Sep 26, 2012, at 11:54 AM, John Foliot <john@foliot.ca> wrote:

> Goldstein, Glenn wrote:
>> 
>> does anyone know if iOS6 safari has text track support for
>> webVTT on iPhone?
>> 
>> my simple tests that work in Chrome Canary are not rendering
>> webVTT on iOS6.
>  
> Hi Glenn,
> 
> As far as I can recall, this might be an open issue for mobile delivery
> (both iOS as well as Android and possibly others). I believe the issue is in
> managing 2 data-streams concurrently on the mobile devices (bandwidth and
> processing), which hand off video to the native video players on the
> hand-helds, and do not use the web browser like on the desktop experience.
> 
  The lack of WebVTT support in MobileSafari on iOS 6 has nothing to do with any of this, we just didn't have enough time to implement it.

> I am unaware of a proposed solution at this time short of burned-in
> captions, coupled with some server-side sniffing (or maybe media-queries?)
> to deliver the correct media file to the hand-held device(s) - but happy to
> be schooled otherwise.
> 
  In-band captions, eg. captions in an MPEG-4 container, have been supported on iOS for some time.

eric