Bug 37591 – HTML5 "video" tag with poster frame defined "flashes" right before movie displays

• Status: RESOLVED
• Resolution: FIXED
• Component: Media

[Dan Wood]

Safari: HTML5 "video" tag won't show movie when poster attribute is defined

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Create a web page with a <video> tag with the "poster" attribute.  For instance, see http://www.karelia.com/scripts/claire2.html
2. Load the page

Expected Results:
The movie should instantly replace the poster image

Actual Results:
The poster image disappears for a long enough time to notice, before it is replaced by the movie.

Notes:

This is using TOT Webkit.

[Silvia Pfeiffer]

The effect you are describing happens for me in Google Chrome only.

In my Safari (Version 4.0.5 (6531.22.7)) the behaviour is even more broken for this page, since the first video doesn't play at all, even though it is on autoplay.

I have actually noticed generally that if I set a poster attribute in Google Chrome or Safari and don't set autoplay, that poster frame flashes briefly, then disappears and is replaced with the first frame of the video. While that is acceptable according to the HTML5 specification, I don't think it is what a Web developer or user would expect. In fact, this is also inconsistent with the behaviour of Opera and Firefox, which keep displaying the poster frame until the user hits the play button (or the JS play function is called).

[Eric Carlson]

Created attachment 62348 [details]
proposed patch.

[Eric Carlson]

Created attachment 63775 [details]
revised patch.

[Eric Carlson]

http://trac.webkit.org/changeset/64884

[Ademar Reis]

Revision r64884 cherry-picked into qtwebkit-2.2 with commit 787fad8 <http://gitorious.org/webkit/qtwebkit/commit/787fad8>