webm not playing on Android

Question

I was under the impression that webm played on Android, but I can't get the videos to play on my Galaxy Nexus. I haven't tried in the browser on the phone, just straight up and in the VideoView. Is there some magic combo of settings needed?

Answer 1

Yes, webm plays on android just fine. However, know that HTML5 video is always tricky.

The best way to check is to simply load a webm file in your browser: http://clips.vorwaerts-gmbh.de/big_buck_bunny.webm

There a number of reasons why the video may not be playing for you including:

• The webm file may not have been encoded correctly
• You are using a video playing application that does not handle webm files
• Data integrity was lost when transferring it to your phone
• There may be an issue with the current build of your OS (although if you are 2.2 or later there really shouldn't be)

Play around with an html5 video generator to see which video formats are playing on your phone (webm and mp4 should) http://sandbox.thewikies.com/vfe-generator/

Answer 2

I did run in the same bug/problem while developing on my nexus4 (on huawei y300 and y303 phone it worked fine!). Switching to NuPlayer in the developer options fixed this. Apparently the deprecated AwesomePlayer can't play webm in my case.

Nexus 4 Android version 5.1

It's also talked about here: https://github.com/Floens/Clover/issues/2