Building A Mobile Video App With Web Technologies

Scope of support

You can use our HTML5 player to build video-oriented native mobile apps for Android and iOS. The player can be used in the following environments:

• Apps built with Ionic
• Apps built with Apache Cordova
• WebView created from native code
• Standalone web applications

Our player has been tested and optimised to work in the above environments to provide a video experience that can match apps built with native SDK - minus the cost and the headache of having to use native SDK.

Using Radiant Media Player to build native Android or iOS app is only available for PLATFORM edition customers.

Supported OS

Radiant Media Player can be used to build mobile applications for the following mobile OS:

• Android 5+
• iOS 10+ (WKWebView)
• iPadOS 13+ (WKWebView)

With the announcement of Apple in december 2019, to remove support for UIWebView API by end 2020, we only support WKWebView API for iOS apps built with Cordova or Ionic. See this blog post to help you update to WKWebView API.

Supported features

All player features available for the mobile web are generally available with Radiant Media Player for mobile apps. Below is a non-exhaustive list of features you can expect to be available when using Radiant Media Player in a mobile app:

• (1) See the video ads support in mobile apps section
• (2) DVR functionalities are only available on iOS 11+ when the player is in fullscreen mode - in window mode or with previous iOS versions the DVR stream will be handled as a simple live stream
• (3) autoplay (with audio) is available in WebView and Cordova-based applications when the FILE protocol is used. In standalone mode or HTTP WebView only muted autoplay will be available.
• (4) See the Widevine DRM support in Android mobile apps
• (5) See the Google Cast support in Cordova-based application docs
• (6) See the offline playback section
• (7) Support for FairPlay DRM (HLS) in a WebView starts at iOS 13+ and iPadOS 13+
• (8) There is an open ticket with Google to add this feature - please star this issue to prioritise implementation

Video ads support in mobile apps

We do support using video ads in an iOS, iPadOS or Android mobile app built with Ionic, Cordova or WebView. It should be noted that since the HTML5 Google IMA SDK is not officially supported in an iOS or Android WebView, the preferred solution is to use our VAST parser rmp-vast. See this section for more information on limitations when using the Google IMA HTML5 SDK in a mobile app. The VAST parser can be selected with player setting adParser set to 'ima' or 'rmp-vast'.

Widevine DRM support in Android apps

Using Widevine DRM in an Android WebView requires the Widevine CDM to be available in that WebView. Older versions of Android System WebView may not come with that CDM so older Android devices (typically before Android 7) may not always be able to decode Widevine DRM encrypted content (an error message is shown to the viewer in that context).

Offline playback/download/storage

With Radiant Media Player 5.7.6 we now support offline download and storage of media content for offline playback in a Cordova/Ionic mobile apps. This is supported for Android 5+ and iPadOS 13+.

Offline player starts are saved locally and push to our logging servers when an Internet connection becomes available.

Using Radiant Media Player in a Ionic mobile app

Refer to our Working with Ionic Framework guide.

Using Radiant Media Player in a Cordova mobile app

Refer to our Working with Apache Cordova guide.

Using Radiant Media Player in a standalone web application

A standalone web application is designed to look and behave in a way similar to a native application - for example, it is scaled to fit the entire screen of a device. You can tailor your web application for Safari on iOS or Chrome for Android even further, by making it appear like a native application when the user adds it to the "Home screen".

When embedded in a standalone web application the player adds the rmp-standalone class to its container.

iOS

Apple has documentation on how to configure standalone web applications. Notably this is achieved by adding the following meta tag to your HTML page:

<meta name="apple-mobile-web-app-capable" content="yes">

Android

For Chrome on Android Google has a guide for Installable Web Apps with the Web App Manifest. This approach follows the W3C Web App Manifest specification which is also available in Firefox.

Mobile apps specific player settings

The following settings should only be used in the context of a mobile app:

appName: String

This setting allows to set a unique app name with Radiant Media Player. This app name will then be used as an unique identifier in our back-end reporting section. It can be read with API method getAppName. Default: ''.

App allowlisting (PLATFORM Edition)

Refer to our documentation for PLATFORM Edition allowlisting and denylisting.