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.
![5 More HTML5 APIs You Didn’t Know Existed]()
The HTML5 revolution has provided us some awesome JavaScript and HTML APIs. Some are APIs we knew we've needed for years, others are cutting edge mobile and desktop helpers. Regardless of API strength or purpose, anything to help us better do our job is a...
![CSS Animations Between Media Queries]()
CSS animations are right up there with sliced bread. CSS animations are efficient because they can be hardware accelerated, they require no JavaScript overhead, and they are composed of very little CSS code. Quite often we add CSS transforms to elements via CSS during...
![Drag and Drop MooTools File Uploads]()
Honesty hour confession: file uploading within the web browser sucks. It just does. Like the ugly SELECT element, the file input is almost unstylable and looks different on different platforms. Add to those criticism the fact that we're all used to drag and drop operations...
![Table Cell and Position Absolute]()
If you follow me on Twitter, you saw me rage about trying to make position: absolute work within a TD element or display: table-cell element. Chrome? Check. Internet Explorer? Check. Firefox? Ugh, FML. I tinkered in the console...and cussed. I did some researched...and I...
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.