The following is a Linux script I threw together to convert an mpeg4 (.mp4, .mpv, .mpeg4, .mpg) file into ogg vorbis (.ogg, .ogv) and flash video (.flv) maintaining the same bit rate. It also doesn’t hurt to have a .webm format for some older devices. This assumes you already have the appropriate packages installed, including ffmpeg. The script also wasn’t made to be foolproof, and might not be able to read the bitrate on some videos. The script takes a list of mpeg4 files to convert.

for filename in "$@"
do
  extension="${filename##*.}"
  filename="${filename%.*}"

  export BITRATE=`ffmpeg -i $filename.$extension 2>&1 | grep -oP 'Video.*\d+ kb/s' | grep -oP '\d+ kb/s' | grep -oP '\d+'`
  ffmpeg2theora -V $BITRATE -o $filename.ogv $filename.$extension
  ffmpeg -i $filename.$extension -ar 44100 -b ${BITRATE}k -f flv $filename.flv #Add an optional "-threads #" to make this faster
done

Due to the facts of life and economic demand, a majority of the work I’ve been doing over the past 10 years has been web work (PHP, JavaScript, SQL, HTML, CSS). When I first started in this field, browser incompatibilities were a MAJOR problem, but nowadays, it’s incredibly rare for me to write a piece of code in one browser that doesn’t automatically work in all the others without bugs. Maybe it’s just the fact I’ve been doing this for so long that I know what to avoid, but I’d like to think it’s mostly because the browser makers have gotten their acts together and subscribe to making everything compatible by following [W3C] guidelines.

Browser incompatibilities still creep up from time to time though, and I’ll be writing up about a few of them in some of my upcoming posts. The majority and biggest problems I seem to run into nowadays revolve around mobiles.

So in Google Chrome for Android, when trying to include an HTML5 video, the “autoplay” HTML5 attribute seems to be ignored. The obvious less-than-optimal hack would be to just include a “.play()” call in JavaScript, but this seems to only work if the action is triggered by the user (like when trying to create a popup window). So as far as I can see right now, there is no way to autoplay a video in Google Chrome for Android.