How to check for html5 video support?

Question

Is there any JavaScript or any other way of checking for html5 video support?

Solution 1

use:

<script>
alert(!!document.createElement('video').canPlayType);
</script>

if it alerts true implies that your browser supports HTML5 video tag

Here is the url to check HTML5 Browser compatibility http://www.html5test.com/ Open the url in your browser to test how well your browser supports html5

Solution 2

Just a little refinement of sweets-BlingBling's answer : sorry - I can't comment yet :(

var isHTML5Video = (typeof(document.createElement('video').canPlayType) != 'undefined') ? true : false;

or even simpler (thanks digitalBath - as always I can't see the wood for the trees :) )

var isHTML5Video = (typeof(document.createElement('video').canPlayType) != 'undefined');

Solution 3

Have a look at Modernizer: http://www.modernizr.com/

There, you get APIs as easy as

if (Modernizr.video) {
  // html5 video available
}

But many more features and more suitable APIs as well.

Solution 4

One way is to embed the html5 tags, and then put the alternate video viewer within the video tags as a "fallback". The fallback will get displayed if a browser doesnt recognize the tag. Its not strictly 'detecting' html5 video support, but may suit your needs.

<video src='...'>
    <embed flash player instead>
</video>

Solution 5

I use a slight variation of @sweets-BlingBling's answer, which is:

var hasVideo = !!document.createElement('video').canPlayType &&
               !!document.createElement('video').canPlayType('video/mp4')

This also checks whether the media type 'video/mp4' is actually playable (change this if your video has another media type, like 'video/webm' or 'video/ogg'). The method returns an empty String if the video definitely cannot be played and 'probably' or 'maybe' (actually, both results mean yes in most instances) otherwise. I had to add this for Chrome 41 (seemingly used in google crawler), which has canPlayType, but cannot play mp4 videos.

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Comments

[digitalbath]

For what it's worth, "{boolean_expression} ? true : false" is no different than "{boolean_expression}"

[D. Dan]

IE11 returns true, but doesn't play hls stream/video with videojs. Having a flash fallback is not an option. Any ideas?

[Randy]

Just curious if this line of code will generate java script errors when debugging a page, IF the browser actually was not capable of parsing "document.createElement('video').canPlayType", because it was too old for HTML5. I guess it would always generate "false" for the variable, but would it choke in doing so?