Approaches for debugging HTML5 video on an iPad

Question

I'm writing a video encoder/server to serve video to a web application intended to run on an iPad. The iPad uses an HTML5 video tag to retrieve and decode the video, and I'm running into issues where the encoded video isn't being decoded correctly.

Is there anything like a system log on the iPad where I can find any information about what the video decoder finds objectionable in my bitstream, or any other way of getting some visibility into the decoding process?

Answer 1

Older versions of IOS allowed you to turn on the Safari debug console (settings ->safari->advanced -> debug console). This was handy for logging errors etc. If you are a mac user apparently there is a nice interface for doing so.

If you have desktop Safari you can also fake the user agent see: http://www.dummies.com/how-to/content/how-to-activate-user-agent-switcher-in-safari.html this will allow you to use web debug tools to see whats going on.

Alternatively you can create a 'Debug' panel in your webapp and hijack the console.log function so you can see errors etc.

Example:

<div id="debug-info"></div>

<script>

(function(){
    var oldLog = console.log;
    console.log = function (message) {
        // DO MESSAGE HERE.
        oldLog.apply(console, arguments);
        $('#debug-info').prepend('<p>'+message+'</p>')
    };
})();

</script>