There may be times you want to test your HTML5 player on a regular computer in order to access developer tools. There are a few ways you can do this.
XCode's iOS Simulator
If you have XCode installed on a Mac, you have access to iOS Simulator. Once XCode has been installed from the App Store the simulator is available from the Open Developer Tool submenu in XCode's menu.
When a website is open in mobile Safari in the Simulator you'll be able to use desktop Safari's developer tools. Simply choose the iOS Simulator in the Develop menu.
Testing in a desktop browser
By loading the HTML player in a desktop browser, you will have access to that browser's regular developer tools.
Only Chrome and Safari are useful for testing HTML players as they support h264 playback and like their mobile counterparts are based on the WebKit rendering engine. Safari will also play back HLS renditions.
The HTML player can be loaded on desktop in one of two ways:
- The player can be forced into HTML5 mode by appending forceHTML=true to the URL where the player is located.
Example: http://example.com/myvideo.html?forceHTML=true.
This method will generally succeed on a website unless other page code is interfering with this being passed through to the player. - You can add the same option within the player publishing code
Example: <param name="forceHTML" value="true" />.
Note: This parameter is to be used solely for testing and is not supported for use in production.