I am developing a time-lapse video player using HTML5 Video element and is controlled by mouse (touch) events. The problem is that the videos which will be played are encoded at a different frame rate, not fixed like common 24 FPS. In native platforms such as iOS, there is a native API which provides video's frame rate. I am wondering if is there any similar API on HTML5 Media API. Without this information, I cannot play a video smoothly on my player.
Mozzila Developer Network does not list any methods for finding the framerate of a media element. However, there is an experimental method called seekToNextFrame which could be used to advance frame by frame. This is only supported by firefox behind a flag.
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I have a MP4 video of a product which shows a 360 of the product (so it looks like it's spinning) - I have it autoplaying on the page and looks great.
I want the user to be able to click and drag on the video to basically rewind or fastforward the video, so they can kind of scroll back and forth and spin the product around as they wish.
We have used the js-cloudimage-360-view library and used images, but because we wanted this as smooth as possible each colour had 360 images and loading times weren't great, we have MP4s which are small in size and load fast but it's just the srubbing I can't get right.
I'd had a look at this https://codepen.io/webandapp/pen/xEjjOJ too but it's supper jumpy, essentially we want if the user drags to the right it fast forwards as they drag, when they stop it should play from that point (and rewinds if dragging to the left) - this should be as smooth as possible.
The video is just a HTML video element like so:
<video id="three-sixty-video" preload="auto" controls loop playsinline autoplay muted>
<source src="/video/video-1.mp4" type="video/mp4;">
</video>
Scrubbing on a streamed video is limited by the speed at which the video can be downloaded, decoded and displayed.
For a large video on most devices and connections it is not practical/possible to do all this as quickly as a user can scroll along the video timeline.
This is why video containers (mp4 etc) often include a track of thumbnail images which are displayed when the user scrubs along the line.
In other words, it is not actually the video you see in the small image in the timeline, but the appropriate thumbnail for that time in the video.
When the user stop scrubbing, the player then requests that section of the video, decodes and displays it. This is (generally) not immediate.
If your video is small enough and is downloaded completely then you may find you can scrub as quickly as you want, but even then it may be device/client dependent - a quick local test with a number of videos seem to suggest it should scrub ok when available locally:
Using a relatively small 30MB, 50 second local mp4 video, available locally on he computer hard drive (a MAC), scrubbing is relatively smooth using the Quicktime client player.
The same video on the same device being viewed by the Safari browser rather than directly by the QuickTime client appears to be similar, although it is hard to be sure. The playback may well use very similar paths under the skin.
Using a much larger 2G, 4K, 2 minute 30 second video, also locally on the hard drive, scrubbing is again relatively smooth both in Safari and QuickTime.
As a side note, if you do decide the solution is to have the video fully downloaded before you play, that is also an interesting challenge. Most effort is usually focused on the opposite, allowing a video to start playing before it fully downloads. You may find that, providing the video is not too big, having the header info at the end (the MooV atom for mp4) will force the browser to download it fully. This is the opposite of the mp4 faststart you will see discussed some places. I'm not sure how reliable this will be as I think some browser may be clever enough to 'search' in the video by making different requests for bytes at the start and end to find the metadata.
All of my research and effort has been hitting a wall so far in this regard: Is there any way to make video autoplay on Safari in iOS currently?
Some have mentioned video transcoding or using playsinline (which works on Android), but nothing has worked for iOS / Safari.
I believe the following is still the current picture for iOS:
elements will now honor the autoplay attribute, for elements which meet the following conditions:
elements will be allowed to autoplay without a user gesture if their source media contains no audio tracks.
elements will also be allowed to autoplay without a user gesture.
If a element gains an audio track or becomes un-muted without a user gesture, playback will pause.
elements will only begin playing when visible on-screen such as when they are scrolled into the viewport, made visible through CSS, and inserted into the DOM.
elements will pause if they become non-visible, such as by being scrolled out of the viewport.
Source: https://webkit.org/blog/6784/new-video-policies-for-ios/
This also requires that the video element has the 'playsinline' attribute.
So there is support for autoplay video, but it is limited so may not meet your particular needs.
One other note - if your use case is for a web view rather than a regular browser, then you have more control. See the documentation for 'wkwebviewconfiguration' and in particular 'mediaTypesRequiringUserActionForPlayback' here:
https://developer.apple.com/documentation/webkit/wkwebviewconfiguration
The video in the top is the stream from navigator.mediaDevices.getUserMedia() which is set as the source of a the first video element. The bottom video is the video from MediaRecorder API. The video is played from a Virtual Web Camera (OBS VirtualCam specifically)
The problem I'm having with this
When the video starts to stream for the web camera (once allowed) the media seems to be pushed to the MediaSource but the playback took a while to actually play (about 2-3 seconds). What kind of behaviour is this?
Another problem is the playback in the bottom video is delayed, I have been testing and I am finding that the problem is because of the mediaRecorder.ondataavailable is not triggered fast enough, thus the chucks are delayed. In what way possible that the MediaRecorder API or similar API can be used to record in much lower latency than this.
UPDATE:
What is happening here? 1. Video from camera is play directly in the video element, that element video stream is recorded through MediaRecorder API, recorded video is sent to server (websocket). The video (bottom) is playing the video from websocket. My tests shows that the latency is not from the Websocket but from the either the MediaRecorder or the playback is delayed.
I have a <video> element at the top of my page playing an animation in the background (very similar to the one found on the Google Hangouts page). On most computers, the video plays smoothly and it seems fine, but on older hardware there is a lot of lag and the browser slows down quite a lot.
Is there anyway to detect the performance of the video playback? I'd like to either replace the video with a static image or pause the video if performance is an issue.
Use the video metrics if available in your browser. Here's an example using webkit prefixed DroppedFrameCount.
http://git.chromium.org/gitweb/?p=chromium.git;a=blob;f=chrome/test/data/media/html/media_stat_perf.html
See also: http://wiki.whatwg.org/wiki/Video_Metrics for the Moz prefix.
You could use Get the timestamp of loaded page to determine how fast the user loads the page, then if their bandwidth is below a specified threshold, supply an image rather than the variable.
What's the best way to show an animation from after effects on a website onload?
It needs to play like a load screen in all major browsers and iOS devices.
What's the best way to show this?
I tried html5 and the auto play didn't work on iPad. I don't want to use flash. The animation is too complex for just JavaScript. Is it worth trying to make a high quality animated GIF?
Well, your main problem with virtually any onload video is going to be load and buffer time, especially on a mobile device. If the splash screen takes half a minute to load, the experience will be very subpar, and there's virtually nothing you can really do to reduce that load time short of making the video low quality (a large animated gif will have the same problem).
My recommendation would be to try coding the animation using pure HTML5 animation effects if possible. They will render faster, use only static images, javascript and CSS, and will be more widely compatible with modern desktop and mobile browsers.
Unfortunately, it is not possible to auto-play html5 video on an iOS device. At least as of iOS 5, Apple has disabled both auto-play and pre-loading, presumably to save bandwidth for users who may be on limited or expensive mobile data plans.
Unless you're willing to skip the video, the only workaround is to get the visitor to click or touch something on the page. Mobile Safari will allow you to play a video using Javascript methods (as opposed to the native player controls), but the first call to .play() has to come from a "click" or "touch" event handler.
You can limit this requirement to iPads and still allow desktop browsers to auto-play, but there doesn't appear to be any kind of reliable feature-detection method, so you have to parse the User Agent string (navigator.userAgent).
There isn't much documentation on the strange, non-standard things Mobile Safari does with video, but this article has some very good, detailed information and some code samples:
http://blog.millermedeiros.com/html5-video-issues-on-the-ipad-and-how-to-solve-them/
Edit: And then there's this elaborate and absurd workaround that Apple uses on its own site.
https://docs.google.com/document/pub?id=1GWTMLjqQsQS45FWwqNG9ztQTdGF48hQYpjQHR_d1WsI