Raise your hand if you want better Native Video Player support on iPhone!

Please submit a bug/enhancement report to Apple if you would like them to remove the restriction on iPhone's ability to playback native video inline (as opposed to ALWAYS going fullscreen). This is handy for a number of application:

1. Using actionscript and stageWebView, you can control the native video player by issuing javascript calls to content embedded in an html page. (see http://www.yeahbutisitflash.com/?p=3968 for a good tutuorial)

Likewise, you can have your movie react to events happening in the native video player (time index, finished playing, etc.) by doing the reverse (again, http://www.yeahbutisitflash.com/?p=3996 is a great read for how to get started doing this)

2. You can allow the user to send video content to an Apple TV (or maybe a future iTV?) without releasing app functionality. ie: the user doesn't get locked into a full-screen state on his or her device.

The ONLY reason AIR lacks interactivity with the native player on iOS is because the Obj-C UIwebview webview.allowsInlineMediaPlayback property is set to "NO" by default on the iPhone (it is set to "YES" on the iPad and everything I described above works beautifully!)

From what I gather, in Xcode, you simply set this UIwebview propterty to "yes" along with adding "webkit-playsinline" to the html video tag in order to permit an app to play back video inline on the iPhone. I suggested to Apple they remove the restriction, perhaps requiring the html tag alone for inline playback.

If you agree that AIR should have improved native video handling, please submit a bug/enhancement report to Apple bugreport.apple.com  Having this "restriction" lifted will ensure we can produce quality Universal media apps with identical functionality on both iPad and iPhone platforms.

Thanks for reading!