changing source on html5 video tag

I'm trying to build a video player that works everywhere. so far I'd be going with:

<video>
    <source src="video.mp4"></source>
    <source src="video.ogv"></source>
    <object data="flowplayer.swf" type="application/x-shockwave-flash">
        <param name="movie" value="flowplayer.swf" />
        <param name="flashvars" value='config={"clip":"video.mp4"}' />
    </object>
</video>

(as seen on several sites, for example video for everybody) so far, so good.

But now I also want some kind of playlist/menu along with the video player, from which I can select other videos. Those should be opened within my player right away. So I will have to "dynamically change the source of the video" (as seen on dev.opera.com/articles/everything-you-need-to-know-html5-video-audio/ - section "Let's look at another movie") with Javascript. Let's forget about the Flash player (and thus IE) part for the time being, I will try to deal with that later.

So my JS to change the <source> tags should be something like:

<script>
function loadAnotherVideo() {
    var video = document.getElementsByTagName('video')[0];
    var sources = video.getElementsByTagName('source');
    sources[0].src = 'video2.mp4';
    sources[1].src = 'video2.ogv';
    video.load();
}
</script>

The problem is, this doesn't work in all browsers. Namely, in Firefox there is a nice page where you can observe the problem I'm having: http://www.w3.org/2010/05/video/mediaevents.html

As soon as I trigger the load() method (in Firefox, mind you), the video player dies.

Now I have found out that when I don't use multiple <source> tags, but instead just one src attribute within the <video> tag, the whole thing does work in Firefox.

So my plan is to just use that src attribute and determine the appropriate file using the canPlayType() function.

Am I doing it wrong somehow or complicating things?

I hated all these answers because they were too short or relied on other frameworks.

Here is "one" vanilla JS way of doing this, working in Chrome, please test in other browsers:

var video = document.getElementById('video');
var source = document.createElement('source');

source.setAttribute('src', 'http://techslides.com/demos/sample-videos/small.mp4');
source.setAttribute('type', 'video/mp4');

video.appendChild(source);
video.play();
console.log({
  src: source.getAttribute('src'),
  type: source.getAttribute('type'),
});

setTimeout(function() {
  video.pause();

  source.setAttribute('src', 'http://techslides.com/demos/sample-videos/small.webm');
  source.setAttribute('type', 'video/webm');

  video.load();
  video.play();
  console.log({
    src: source.getAttribute('src'),
    type: source.getAttribute('type'),
  });
}, 3000);

<video id="video" width="320" height="240"></video>

External Link

Modernizr worked like a charm for me.

What I did is that I didn't use <source>. Somehow this screwed things up, since the video only worked the first time load() was called. Instead I used the source attribute inside the video tag -> <video src="blabla.webm" /> and used Modernizr to determine what format the browser supported.

<script>
var v = new Array();

v[0] = [
        "videos/video1.webmvp8.webm",
        "videos/video1.theora.ogv",
        "videos/video1.mp4video.mp4"
        ];
v[1] = [
        "videos/video2.webmvp8.webm",
        "videos/video2.theora.ogv",
        "videos/video2.mp4video.mp4"
        ];
v[2] = [
        "videos/video3.webmvp8.webm",
        "videos/video3.theora.ogv",
        "videos/video3.mp4video.mp4"
        ];

function changeVid(n){
    var video = document.getElementById('video');

    if(Modernizr.video && Modernizr.video.webm) {
        video.setAttribute("src", v[n][0]);
    } else if(Modernizr.video && Modernizr.video.ogg) {
        video.setAttribute("src", v[n][1]);
    } else if(Modernizr.video && Modernizr.video.h264) {
        video.setAttribute("src", v[n][2]);
    }

    video.load();
}
</script>

Hopefully this will help you :)

If you don't want to use Modernizr , you can always use CanPlayType().

Your original plan sounds fine to me. You'll probably find more browser quirks dealing with dynamically managing the <source> elements, as indicated here by the W3 spec note:

Dynamically modifying a source element and its attribute when the element is already inserted in a video or audio element will have no effect. To change what is playing, just use the src attribute on the media element directly, possibly making use of the canPlayType() method to pick from amongst available resources. Generally, manipulating source elements manually after the document has been parsed is an unncessarily[sic] complicated approach.

http://dev.w3.org/html5/spec/Overview.html#the-source-element