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I'm trying to play an HTML5 video in reverse on an iPad (The video needs to switch between forward and reverse arbitrarily based on user input).
The HTML5 <video> element includes a property called playbackRate which allows video to be played at a faster or slower rate, or in reverse. According to Apple's documentation, this property is not supported on iOS.
Playing in reverse can be faked without the use of playbackRate by setting the currentTime property multiple times per second (e.g. 10-30 updates per second). This approach works on desktop Safari but it seems that seeking is capped on iOS devices to around 1 update per second - too slow in my case.
Is there any way to play an HTML5 video backward on an iOS device (namely an iPad)?
(I'm testing on an iPad 2 running 4.3.1)
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While the iPhone does not have a feature to allow users to reverse videos on the device, you can install third-party apps to play recorded videos backwards. For example, Reverse Vid is one of the free and user-friendly apps that will easily enable you to reverse videos on your iPhone or iPad.
Without even going into HTML5 or Javascript, many video formats are streaming formats that are designed to be played forward. Playing it backwards would require decoding the whole stream, storing each raw frame on the disk to avoid clobbering memory, then rendering the frames backwards.
At the lower section of your phone screen, you can find various tools, such as Trim, Resize, Rotate, Reverse, etc. Choose REVERSE. Then tap the Play button over the video to play the video backward.
As Mihai suggested, use the two versions and update the seek location when the user changes the playback direction.
Layer the videos in DIVs on top of one another, and when the playback direction is flipped, toggle the div visibility (and pause playback of the the one being hidden).
So this is the timeline:
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