[whatwg] video tag : loop for ever

[Michael A. Puls II]

On 10/14/08, Ian Hickson <ian at hixie.ch> wrote:
> To be honest I'm not really convinced we need the looping feature at all.
> It seems like we should drop this from the current version. What benefit
> does it bring? Is looping really that common? If we got rid of it we could
> find better ways of picking the start time.

Whenever I come across an awesome video with an awesome song, I'll
loop it for hours. I'll even loop it while I sleep. When it comes to
playlists, I loop them too.

Not sure if there's an option in the query string I can specify, but
if youtube supports 'loop', I'll definitely use it. For now, looping
the flv file in videolan works fine.

For shoutcast radio streams, I'll loop a playlist of them in foobar
(after a while a server will boot you and foobar will switch to
another station)

Most media players seem to have options like:
Repeat track or Repeat one or loop
Repeat all or Repeat playlist

So, fwiw, for me, the concept of looping forever is an everyday thing.
Specifying a playcount that's really high can work really well.
However, 99999999 doesn't specify my intent as well as loop or repeat
etc. does. If foobar or videolan made me do 999999999 to mean "loop",
I'd be upset. Same thing with CD players.

Seeking to the beginning when the ended event fires sounds like a good
workaround for patching in a loop feature. But, you'd have to do it on
a per-instance basis. (Unless there's a way to patch the video
element's constructor from JS to auto attach an event listener when
the element is created).

It seems like someone might want to loop video demos over and over too.

-- 
Michael