We have been getting an increasing number of users contacting us to report that the video quality in our apps has degraded since their upgrade to iOS6 – so I wanted to take a moment to describe why this is happening.
When we play videos, we are not using a player that we created, we rely on the YouTube playback mechanism built-in to the device. In versions of iOS before 6, a YouTube app was built-in to the operating system. When we requested that a video “play” – it was the built-in YouTube player app that would play the video.
With the release of iOS6, Apple has removed the built-in player app. In order to keep thousands of applications in the store (like ours) that relied on this player from breaking, Apple has chosen to use YouTube’s new iFrame player (HTML5).
The good news is that all of these apps still work. The bad news is that for some reason, the iFrame player does not quite seem to be as good with regards to quality. Additionally, the videos seem to take a bit longer to actually start playing once the link is clicked.
Unfortunately, this player is *NOT* a part of our apps. There is not much that we can do to change the quality of the videos that it plays. We are investigating other options and if we can find a higher quality method of playback, we will update all of our apps to use this new method.