Html – Play infinitely looping video on-load in HTML5

htmlhtml5-videovideovideo streaming

I'm looking to place a video in an HTML5 page that will begin playing on page-load, and once completed, loop back to the beginning without a break. The video should also NOT have any controls associated with it, and either be compatible with all 'modern' browsers, or have the option of a polyfill.

Previously I would have done this via Flash and FLVPlayback, but I would prefer to steer clear of Flash in the HTML5 sphere. I'm thinking I could use javascript's setTimeout to create a smooth loop, but what should I use to embed the video itself? Is there something out there that will stream the video the way FLVPlayback would?

Best Answer

The loop attribute should do it:

<video width="320" height="240" autoplay loop>
  <source src="movie.mp4" type="video/mp4" />
  <source src="movie.ogg" type="video/ogg" />
  Your browser does not support the video tag.
</video>

Should you have a problem with the loop attribute (as we had in the past), listen to the videoEnd event and call the play() method when it fires.

Note1: I'm not sure about the behavior on Apple's iPad/iPhone, because they have some restrictions against autoplay.

Note2: loop="true" and autoplay="autoplay" are deprecated

Related Solutions

Javascript – Storing Objects in HTML5 localStorage

Looking at the Apple, Mozilla and Mozilla again documentation, the functionality seems to be limited to handle only string key/value pairs.

A workaround can be to stringify your object before storing it, and later parse it when you retrieve it:

var testObject = { 'one': 1, 'two': 2, 'three': 3 };

// Put the object into storage
localStorage.setItem('testObject', JSON.stringify(testObject));

// Retrieve the object from storage
var retrievedObject = localStorage.getItem('testObject');

console.log('retrievedObject: ', JSON.parse(retrievedObject));

HTML 5 video custom controls

In the HTML5 spec, there is a controls attribute for <video>.

Also check out this article: Video on the Web - Dive into HTML5. It explains:

By default, the element will not expose any sort of player controls. You can create your own controls with plain old HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. The element has methods like play() and pause() and a read/write property called currentTime. There are also read/write volume and muted properties. So you really have everything you need to build your own interface.

If you don’t want to build your own interface, you can tell the browser to display a built-in set of controls. To do this, just include the controls attribute in your tag.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Javascript – Storing Objects in HTML5 localStorage

HTML 5 video custom controls

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