We launched a pretty big UI update today and people seemed to generally enjoy it. But we also launched a little gem that probably went under the radar: full screen mode (without Flash!). If you’re running Safari 5.1 (on Mac OS X Lion) the “expand” button in our player controls will bring you into true full screen mode with our full UI.
This functionality is supported in Lion via WebKit (the rendering engine behind Safari and Chrome). Although Chrome doesn’t yet support full screen, once it gets up to speed with Safari, you guys will get true full screen mode too. In fact, any browser on any operating system that supports the new HTML5 full screen spec will get the same fancy treatment from Shelby.
How do we do it? Pretty simple; here’s the actual code running in production:
$(“#app-holder”)[0].webkitRequestFullScreen();
document.webkitCancelFullScreen();
If you’re on an iPad, that’s cool too. You have to click the full screen button on the video element and our full UI won’t be there (due to limitations in the YouTube API and mobile Safari, respectively) but you’ll get big beautiful full screen video (despite Apple trying to hold HTML5 down!). And I almost forgot, AirPlay just works*.
*actually, YouTube HTML5 video AirPlay has been broken for a couple of weeks now. They broke it, not me. So once YouTube and Apple get that straightened out, AirPlay will be back.
