Has YouTube broken IFrame embedding on iPhone?

Question

We've been using YouTube's iframe embedding for videos. All is fine; execpt on iPhone. On the iPhone the video placeholder image gets stretched about twice as high as it should be. Playing the video results in the message 'You need to update your Adobe Flash Player...' - which surely can't be right?

This was working fine about a week ago.

I'm currently testing on an iPhone 4 with 4.3.1 - but have also tested on an iPad 4.2.1.

My example clip I'm testing with is here: http://wexion.net/posts/youtube_iframe_test

The HTML for that page is just the following, but it's the same issue happens if I put it on a 'proper' page.

<iframe class="youtube-player" type="text/html" width="300" height="246"  src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/mG0xiG_0I2E" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>

Does anyone else have this issue? Know what's going on? Or/and have a possible fix?

Answer 1

It seems to be a problem that Google/YouTube is aware of. http://groups.google.com/group/youtube-api-gdata/browse_thread/thread/861d5605093fdd7b# and http://groups.google.com/group/youtube-api-gdata/browse_thread/thread/7490cb2d0aa69120

Pertinent clip: (posted by Jeff Posnick, YouTube API Team, Tue, 5 Apr 2011 09:15:37 -0700 (PDT))

Just to update folks, the Players engineering team is working to resolve two separate issues affecting iOS iframe playback:

One issue results in the "You need to upgrade your Flash Player..." error message. This message appears to be triggered when there's an attempt to play monetized videos (i.e. videos with ads) using the iframe embed on iOS WebKit. This error message is obviously inappropriate, since there's no Flash Player on iOS, but in the end the video still might not actually play even when the error message is changed, because not all monetized videos are currently playable on iOS devices.

There's another issue related to the iframe player resizing on the page after playback starts. That's also being worked on. I do not yet have any information about whether one or both of those issues will be resolved in time for this week's push of new player code, which will take place Wednesday evening PDT. I'll update this thread with more information when I have it.