Android – Streaming Video (or Progressive Download) to the Droid Browser

I've just done some experimentation with this, and from what I can tell you need three things:

1. You must not use the type attribute when calling the video.
2. You must manually call video.play()
3. The video must be encoded to some quite strict parameters; using the iPhone setting on Handbrake with the 'Web Optimized' button checked usually does the trick.

Have a look at the demo on this page: http://broken-links.com/tests/video/

This works, AFAIK, in all video-enabled desktop browsers, iPhone and Android.

Here's the markup:

<video id="video" autobuffer height="240" width="360">
<source src="BigBuck.m4v">
<source src="BigBuck.webm" type="video/webm">
<source src="BigBuck.theora.ogv" type="video/ogg">
</video>

And I have this in the JS:

var video = document.getElementById('video');
video.addEventListener('click',function(){
  video.play();
},false);

I tested this on a Samsung Galaxy S and it works fine.

is it possible to play video as progressive download, or by streaming, simply by using setVideoPath or setVideoURI, as in VideoViewDemo in the API samples?

It should. It certainly works with MediaPlayer, and VideoView is just a ~200 line wrapper around MediaPlayer and a SurfaceView.

The VideoViewDemo code suggests using setVideoURI for streaming, but I'm not clear what kind of URL I should be using.

http:// and rtsp:// can work, if the video was encoded properly.

Does someone have an example URL for a video that can be streamed to the Android emulator using the VideoViewDemo code?

This video works with MediaPlayer, except on the Nexus One.

EDIT: Actually, that link works with the Nexus One as well.