Play infinitely looping video on-load in HTML5

stefmikhail picture stefmikhail · Apr 30, 2012 · Viewed 234.3k times · Source

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?

Answer

longi picture longi · May 2, 2012

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