Does the metadata preload attribute on html 5 loads the entire video?

basagabi picture basagabi · Sep 7, 2016 · Viewed 13.1k times · Source

When using html 5 video tag, does the preload="metadata" attribute load the video already? I'm a bit concerned about the performance issue on page load is should the video size be greater than 100MB.

I notice that when having this attribute, an image of the very first second of the video is loaded but does not exactly play the video.

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

Answer

ejcortes picture ejcortes · Nov 22, 2017

As per spec, it shouldn't download the whole video, only the metadata, but WebKit browsers apparently do preload the whole video before the metadata.

I hope this helps.

Also see: Problem retrieving HTML5 video duration