iOS App: Replace Flash in webview with native player - ios

Question

I'm about to work on my first ever iOS app. For the first version, the main goal is to make the app a webview of my website. This is easy so far by just pointing a webview to the proper url. The part I need help with is replacing a Flash video player in the webview with a native video player.
Basically on the website I have a Flash video player that connects to a streaming video server with RTMP. As of now, the website is required to use Flash video (so converting to HTML5 video is not an option). The iOS app should show the website as is, except find the Flash player and replace it with a native video player so that the video playback still works on the iPhone/iPad.
Does anyone have any advice for accomplishing this?

Answer 1

This can be done. It may not be clean and pretty, but here is a possible approach: You are going to need to parse the HTML prior to displaying it.
First, you need to intercept the load request calls of your UIWebView so that you can check to see if it is calling the URL of the page that has the Flash you need to parse out. To intercept the load request call, use the UIWebViewDelegate method webView:shouldStartLoadWithRequest:navigationType: to read the URL.
If the URL matches the URL you need to remove the Flash from, you are going to run code that loads a HTML string that you will parse into the web view (more on that in a minute) and return NO to the webView:shouldStartLoadWithRequest:navigationType: delegate method. This means that when the user tries to go to the page with the Flash in it, we are going to stop the UIWebView from doing its thing and load the view with our own parsed content.
Once you figure out that you need to parse the HTML, you need to get in into a variable that you can work with. To get the HTML of your page as a string:
NSURL *yourURL = [NSURL URLWithString:#"http://google.com"];
NSError *error;
NSString *htmlString = [NSString stringWithContentsOfURL:yourURL encoding:NSUTF8Encoding error:&error];
Once you have the string, to remove the Flash code from your HTML, see this question:
Comment out a string in HTML before UIWebView can display it
Once you have parsed the HTML and gotten rid of your Flash, you can load it into your web view with [webView loadHTMLString:string baseURL:nil];
Finally, you need to insert a native movie player on top of your web view via code. You'll have to deal with screen rotation and sizing and placement of the native player on top of the web view, but that fun I will leave to you.
That is a lot of raw material, but is should get you going on one on possible solution.

Answer 2

So, what you’re asking is to show a WebView inside the native app, and show some native components inside this WebView. This cannot be done.
You will have to build a completely native app for this. Or use HTML5 inside the WebView.