1041238 - Automatically loop short WebM videos

Status: RESOLVED INACTIVE

(Core :: Audio/Video: Playback, enhancement)

Description

[Kornel]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.10; rv:33.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/33.0 (Beta/Release)
Build ID: 20140704030208

Steps to reproduce:

Open a URL to a 3-second WebM video, e.g. http://zippy.gfycat.com/AromaticHeartfeltEyelashpitviper.webm



Actual results:

The video stops playing after 3 seconds.


Expected results:

When a video is very short it's likely to be intended to be played in a loop, like GIF.

I suggest automatically looping videos opened directly (i.e. navigated to, rather than embedded via <video>) if they're shorter than 15 seconds (and perhaps only if the video doesn't contain any sound tracks, if you'd prefer to limit scope of that behavior).

My motivation is to make WebM a fully-featured replacement for GIF. Related bug #1041233

Comment 1

[Mardeg]

This could make sense in watching WebM standalone, but would break the current standard at http://www.w3.org/TR/2012/WD-html5-20121025/media-elements.html#attr-media-loop for embedding a <video> since gif images have the looping directive within them, whereas the <video> loop attribute is how looping is opt-in on a html page.
Om that case the course to take is to file a bug at https://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/ to alter the standard.

Comment 2

[Mardeg]

It might be worth making the case for it in relation to bug 1041233 if it's implemented, that webm in <img> tags should auto loop.

Comment 3

[Kornel]

(In reply to Mardeg from comment #1)
> This could make sense in watching WebM standalone, but would break the
> current standard

Agreed. The standard is fine - when page author embeds video themselves they can control looping themselves too.

What I'm concerned about here is only the standalone case (i.e. the player created by Firefox automatically when user clicks a webm URL).

Comment 4

[Nils Ohlmeier [:drno]]

Mass closing because of inactivity.
Please feel free to re-open if still relevant.