How can I cause an HLS (m3u8) video to loop in Safari? - html

Question

I took an mp4 video, encoded it for HTTP Live Streaming (HLS) using ffmpeg — resulting in a series of myvideo.ts files and a myvideo.m3u8 playlist — and am attempting to play it using the HTML <video> tag in Safari, with the native HLS capabilities of that browser:
<video id="myvideo" src="myvideo.m3u8" loop="loop"></video>
It plays, once. But despite the "loop" attribute in the video tag, it doesn't loop. It stays frozen on the last frame of the video.
If I try to detect the end of the video using an event listener as described here:
Detect when an HTML5 video finishes
… that event never seems to fire.
The "paused" property in javascript (document.getElementById('myvideo').paused) evaluates to false, even after the video has played once and stopped.
How can I get the video to loop in Safari?

Answer 1

HLS is intended to be a live stream, so it never actually "finishes" in order to automatically loop. I used a JavaScript timer as a hack to get around this:
var LOOP_WAIT_TIME_MS = 1000,
vid = document.getElementById("myvideo"),
loopTimeout;
vid.addEventListener('play', function() {
if (!/\.m3u8$/.test(vid.currentSrc)) return;
loopTimeout = window.setTimeout(function() {
loopTimeout = null;
vid.pause();
vid.play();
}, (vid.duration - vid.currentTime) * 1000 + LOOP_WAIT_TIME_MS);
});
vid.addEventListener('pause', function() {
if (!/\.m3u8$/.test(vid.currentSrc)) return;
if (loopTimeout) {
clearTimeout(loopTimeout);
loopTimeout = null;
}
});