Get and Set HTML5 Video Current Time
Last week I explored how you could get the duration of a HTML5 video. It's an important technique, obviously, but one that may be a bit more important is managing the video's time setting. Both setting and getting the video's time is important when creating a chrome around the video, so let's review how to accomplish this feat.
The first and probably most important part of managing video time state is knowing that video currentTime is the important attribute. You can retrieve the video's current time with the following:
// https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cwkej79U3ek
console.log(video.currentTime); // 25.431747
currentTime acts as both a getter and a setter, so you can move about the video by setting a value to currentTime:
video.currentTime = 0; // Restart
The API is easy enough and the property is self-explanatory. You'll still need to do the "second" math to interpret the time, both inward and outward, but the second unit is as fair as you could expect, so this API is one to be appreciated.
![9 Mind-Blowing WebGL Demos]()
As much as developers now loathe Flash, we're still playing a bit of catch up to natively duplicate the animation capabilities that Adobe's old technology provided us. Of course we have canvas, an awesome technology, one which I highlighted 9 mind-blowing demos. Another technology available...
![CSS vs. JS Animation: Which is Faster?]()
How is it possible that JavaScript-based animation has secretly always been as fast — or faster — than CSS transitions? And, how is it possible that Adobe and Google consistently release media-rich mobile sites that rival the performance of native apps?
This article serves as a point-by-point...
![Geolocation API]()
One interesting aspect of web development is geolocation; where is your user viewing your website from? You can base your language locale on that data or show certain products in your store based on the user's location. Let's examine how you can...
![Full Width Textareas]()
Working with textarea widths can be painful if you want the textarea to span 100% width. Why painful? Because if the textarea's containing element has padding, your "width:100%" textarea will likely stretch outside of the parent container -- a frustrating prospect to say the least. Luckily...
Yeah, it would be nice if it worked as expected.
On mobile browsers i.e., any glitch in network/video makes video stop while currentTime property continues advancing, making it unusable and unreliable unless countless per-browser workarounds are set.
Also changing orientation makes video pause, while currentTime continues running losing any reliability.
Too bad. All those html5 tags are fantastic on paper, in reality they are unusable, unless wasting hours fixing per-browser/device bugs and uniquenesses.