Seeking in HTML5 video with Chrome

It took me a while to figure it out...

The problem turned out to be server-side. I was using a version of Jetty to serve all my video-files. The simple configuration of Jetty did not support byte serving.

The difference between Firefox and Chrome is that Firefox will download the entire video file so that you can seek through it, even if the server does not support http code 206 (partial content). Chrome on the other hand refuses to download the entire file (unless it is really small, like around 2-3mb).

So to get the currentTime parameter of html5 video to be working in Chrome, you need a server that supports http code 206.

For anyone else having this problem, you can double check your server config with curl:

curl -H Range:bytes=16- -I http://localhost:8080/GOPR0001.mp4

This should return code 206. If it returns code 200, Chrome will not be able to seek the video, but Firefox will, due to a workaround in the browser.

And a final tip: You can use npm http-server to get a simple http-server for a local folder that supports partial content:

npm install http-server -g

And run it to serve a local folder:

http-server -p 8000

If you wait for canplaythrough instead of loadeddata, it works.

See this codepen example.

Work around if modifying server code is unfeasible. Make an API call for you video, then load the blob into URL.createObjectURL and feed that into the src attribute of your video html tag. This will load the entire file and then chrome will know the size of the file allowing seeking capabilities to work.

 axios.get(`${url}`, {      responseType: "blob"    })      .then(function(response) {        setVideo(URL.createObjectURL(response.data));      })      .catch(function(error) {        // handle error        console.log(error);      });