Possible to mask the G1 browser?

Zappza · 04:06 PM

Possible to mask the G1 browser?

Hi!
In the UK we have a website called iPlayer where you can access all of BBC's content from the previous week.

This website is available to two mobile phones, the Apple iPhone and the Nokia N96.

The way this is made available to the iPhone, is that the iPlayer website detects that it is been browsed from an iPhone, and therefore it gains access to streams that are encoded in 400Kbps H.264 video, 116Kbps AAC audio format, which the G1 should also be able to handle perfectly. However, when I try to browse to the iPlayer website I am prompted to download Flash, which the regular desktop version uses.

Now, I believe that there is three solutions to this:

1. Wait for BBC to enable G1 users to access the iPlayer the same way as the iPhone out of the box. - Ideal, but likely to take some time.

2. Mask the G1's browser to look like the iPhone's Safari browser - Best solution at the moment.

3. Wait for flash to arrive - Not ideal, you will get a format on the video that is encoded for PC users, and will probably even be unplayable on the G1 due to the high resolution on the video.

As most people would agree, we should try to mask the G1 browser as the iPhone Safari browser, I am not so much into the world of web browsers, so I do not now how to do this. I understand that we need to change the signature of the browser, but I don't have a slightest clue on how to do so.

Therefore I ask the know-it-all's here on the xda-dev forums!

link to the BBC iPlayer teams blog about iPlayer on iPhone:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/bbcintern..._behind_t.html

Thanks a lot!
Zappza

edit:
It seems that if you use the third-party browser 'Steel' you can choose what to mask it as, however, there seems to be no video streaming capabilities in Android?

The webpage loads as if it was on the iPhone, but when you try to select a episode, nothing happens...