Apple has included a lot of features in iBooks (either intentionally or just as a consequence of using WebKit) that aren’t 100% there — video, audio, and interactivity are still at a sort-of-working state.

I’m glad that people are trying to use them and posting their results, since that’s a signal to Apple that these are valuable features. On the other hand, I don’t want anyone going nuts trying to find edge cases that do work reliably, since I’m sure these features are going to evolve rapidly.

Great blog and info. Thanks to your example and a little editing in Adobe’s PDFXML I have managed to get our on-line magazine running as an e-book, complete with the videos we normally incorporate.

I’m reading it on my Ipod using iBooks. When the video plays, if I turn the Ipod through 90 degrees, iBook reverts to showing the magazine page after the video, rather than rotating the video player and showing the moving image. The iPod continues to play the actual video, but there appears to be no way of getting it back on the screen with the controls.

Regarding Jose’s question. The Ipod and the Ipad have technical specifications for their video, as long as you honour these specifications then videos will play if you incorporate them using the method you describe.

For the iPod they can be found here.
http://www.apple.com/ipodtouch/specs.html

For the iPad, they can be found here.
http://www.apple.com/ipad/specs/

Thanks
Martin