Play Infinitely Looping Video on-Load in Html5
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...
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?
The loop attribute should do it:
<video width="320" height="240" autoplay loop muted>
<source src="movie.mp4" type="video/mp4" />
<source src="movie.ogg" type="video/ogg" />
Your browser does not support the video tag.
</video>
The addition of the unintuitive muted attribute is required by Chrome as documented on their dev site.
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
As of April 2018, Chrome (along with several other major browsers) now require the muted attribute too.
Therefore, you should use
<video width="320" height="240" autoplay loop muted>
<source src="movie.mp4" type="video/mp4" />
</video>
For iPhone it works if you add also playsinline so:
<video width="320" height="240" autoplay loop muted playsinline>
<source src="movie.mp4" type="video/mp4" />
</video>
You can do this the following two ways:
1) Using loop attribute in video element (mentioned in the first answer):
2) and you can use the ended media event:
window.addEventListener('load', function(){
var newVideo = document.getElementById('videoElementId');
newVideo.addEventListener('ended', function() {
this.currentTime = 0;
this.play();
}, false);
newVideo.play();
});
Sarah Jenkins is a veteran tech journalist with over 12 years of experience covering artificial intelligence, mobile innovations, and digital ethics. Her insights have appeared in leading technology publications worldwide.
