Dynamically using the first frame as poster in HTML5 video?

I'm wondering if there's any straightforward way to achieve this effect, without needing backend code to extract a frame, save it as a jpg and database it somewhere.

An effect whereby the first frame of the video just shows up as the poster when the video loads would be so helpful (it would only work if the browser can play back the video obviously, which might be a little different from how poster traditionally works, but that is not a concern.

Solution 1:

Did you try the following?

just append time in seconds #t={seconds} to source URL:

  <video controls width="360">
    <source src="https://test-videos.co.uk/vids/bigbuckbunny/mp4/h264/1080/Big_Buck_Bunny_1080_10s_1MB.mp4#t=0.1" type="video/mp4" />
  </video>

I have chosen a fraction of second (0.1) to keep number of frames small, because I have the suspect that if you put 1 second, it would "preload" the first 1 second of video (i.e. 24 frames or more ....). Just in case ...

Works fine on Chrome and Firefox on desktop :)
Works not on Android mobile, though :(
I did not test on iOS, iPhone, IE yet ??

Edit May 2021:

I realized that many modern browsers now show automatically a poster of first frame.

Seems like they heard us :-)

Solution 2:

To make it simple you can just add preload="metadata" to your video tag and the second of the first frame #t=0.5 to your video source:

<video width="400" controls="controls" preload="metadata">
  <source src="https://www.w3schools.com/html/mov_bbb.mp4#t=0.5" type="video/mp4">
</video>

Best of luck!