WordPress video player support for Blackberry 10 OS

We’ve just done some testing on my brand new Blackberry Passport (a great QWERTY keyboard device but more on that in another review with our FV Player Pro. 

blackberry passport vs iphone

Here’s the device user agent is:

Mozilla/5.0 (BB10; Kbd) AppleWebKit/537.35+ (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/10.3.1.2576 Mobile Safari/537.35+

Here are some tests using my Blackberry Passport against FV Player, Flowplayer, JWplayer and video.js . Keep in mind that only the Blackberry Passport, Q10, Q5, Z10, Z30, Blackberry Classic, Blackberry Leap and P’9982 and P’9983 run Blackberry 10 OS. Any other Blackberries or RIM devices are running OS 7 or earlier and are not really capable of playing video at all.

Blackberry Passport vs other Blackberry keyboard – photo by Crackberry:
the first five of these phones run Blackberry 10 and should play videos

1. The video on our home page at https://foliovision.com/ – video starts loading but doesn’t play. You have to enter fullscreen and hit play in there, then it plays.
2. https://foliovision.com/player/demos/vimeo-integration – same as above. You still need to enter fullscreen and hit play in there for it to play. I would say core Flowplayer doesn’t detect the device video playback capability (full-screen only, or does it support inline video playback?).
3. https://flowplayer.org/player/ – shows html5 error, that the video is not found.
4. https://flowplayer.org/demos/ – same as 1)

5. JW Player plays fine here (inline playback with skin, fullscreen with no skin): http://www.jwplayer.com/

   The HD switch is broken though, when you hit it, the video is switched but doesn’t fit into the player container, so you only see a part of it. Switching to fullscreen gives you the full picture.

6. Video.JS plays fine here (enters fullscreen and no skin): http://www.videojs.com/
7. MediaElement plays as well (enters fullscreen with no skin, but allows inline playback as well): http://mediaelementjs.com/

Conclusion

As of today Flowplayer support for Blackberry 10 OS is the weakest out of the major video players. Flowplayer say that they never received a test device from BlackBerry so they haven’t worked on it:

https://flowplayer.org/forum/#!/setup:does-flowplayer-552-suppo
https://flowplayer.org/forum/#!/setup:blackberry-support

Like HTC, Blackberry is just trying to stay in business at this point so sending out demo devices may be a less of a priority for them than cash rich companies like Apple, Samsung or even Microsoft (though MS have nearly killed Nokia: how many millions of the great camera phones like the Nokia 1020, 1520 or even 1320 would have been sold if they ran Android, but I digress). 

We tried to tweak the Flowplayer code here to indicate that BlackBerry (BB10) doesn’t support inline video to get at least some video playback. In the end we found that hooking the Flowplayer fullscreen() to the video “ready” event helps. You have to tap the play button after the full screen more is open once again, but it’s better than nothing.

We will be including this hot fix in a new FV WordPress Flowplayer release this week.

We’ve offered to send the Flowplayer team a Blackberry 10 device on those threads. Blackberry is a great Canadian company and one of the few mobile device makers (at least partially) out of the reach of NSA. We’d like to see Blackberry prosper again.

Alec Kinnear

Alec has been helping businesses succeed online since 2000. Alec is an SEM expert with a background in advertising, as a former Head of Television for Grey Moscow and Senior Television Producer for Bates, Saatchi and Saatchi Russia.