Does Android 2.1's Browser Support HTML 5 and What Video Format Does It Play?

Question

The company I work for produces a lot of video and we want to target as many devices as possible, but the question came up of what does the Android do?

I personally own an Android based phone running 2.1, but I can't seem to get the HTML 5 tag to work. Even when I can trigger the browser to playback the video it just throws a notification error that it can't.

Are there guidelines to producing Android/HTML 5 compatible videos? Is it truly supported?

Answer 1

The android 2.1 browser currently does not support the html5 video tag the way the iphone browser does. To get the android browser to play the video when you click on the poster image you need to add onclick="this.play();" to the video tag. However, this launches a separate "window" and does not play the video in the same browser "window".

The only information I could find with details about whether Android 2.1 has the ability to play html5-video is here: http://groups.google.com/group/android-developers/browse_thread/thread/400dc61d41530242/c071c0f9712f7171?lnk=gst&q=html5#c071c0f9712f7171

This question is similar: Does html5 video work on android nexus one with android version 2.1?