Play a local video from iPad in an HTML 5 webpage

Question

Does anyone know if you can use the HTML5 video tag to play a video from the iPad library?

Something like:

<source src="/local/path/video.mp4" type="video/mp4" />

Thanks for your time

Answer 1

As far as I know, web pages don’t have access the iOS devices’ filesystems (hence the lack of support for <input type="file"> on iOS).

The user doesn’t have direct access to the filesystem, so it would be odd if web pages did.

Answer 2

There is a solution even though it is not the most convenient.

You can Jailbreak your iOS device, install Cydia and download/install a web server like iFile.

Then you can reference any file of the devices' filesystem by referencing the IP of the device like:

<source src="http://192.168.x.x:10000/local/path/video.mp4" type="video/mp4" />

iFile will also provide you direct access to your filesystem. As an alternative you can use OpenSSH to access your filesystem remotely via programs like WinSCP.