Great news from Facebook. Starting today , all videos will be HTML5 ready , so we can view them on our iDevices. We don’t even have to wait for an app update, they just work. Unfortunately, videos uploaded in the past will not work on our iDevice…
Later edit:
FSM EXCLUSIVE DEAL ReadWriteWeb did some tests this morning and, it appears that Facebook isn’t actually using HTML5 to display the videos. Instead, what appears to be going on is that Facebook.com is detecting that you’ve arrived to the website via the Safari web browser on the iPad. When you then attempt to play a video on the iPad, it doesn’t play inline (something that would have been a clear confirmation of an HTML5 implementation). Instead, Facebook is linking out to the actual video, transcoded to MP4, a video format that plays on Apple devices.
We confirmed this by uploading a video file to Facebook in WMV format (a non-iPad compatible video format) and then attempting to play it on the iPad. It played as an MP4 file.