[whatwg] Displaying poster for audio in <video>

[Jeroen Wijering]

Hello all,

Playing audio in <video> succeeds consistently across browsers, as described in the spec: 

  "Both audio and video elements can be used for both audio and video. The main difference between the two is simply that the audio element has no playback area for visual content (such as video or captions), whereas the video element does."

However, poster display behavior varies between browsers. Some browsers (FF, IE, Opera) will keep the poster up after an audio file has started, other browsers (Webkits, WinPho) clear the poster, which results in a blank area: 

  http://goo.gl/0g77d

It would be good if this behavior could be rationalized and/or addressed in the spec. My preference would be to continue showing the poster image if the media file has no (active) video track - a poster image looks much better than a blank area.

Ideally, this would also be the case for "fullscreen" playback on mobile devices.

Kind regards,

Jeroen Wijering
LongTail Video