play video from data in File object

Question

Is it possible to play video by somehow passing data from a File object into a <video> tag?

I know you can base64 encode things to put include the data in the DOM, but I understand there are size limits on this, so can anyone think of another way, or a workaround for this?

For now it's just a bit of an experiment, so lets not worry too much about video file formats... just assume that the format works with the browser you're using.

Answer 1

URL.createObjectURL will create urls that link to the files, otherwise you will just crash your browser.

var URL = window.URL || window.webkitURL;
var src = URL.createObjectURL( file );

videoElem.src = src;

The urls will use blob scheme, example:

"blob:http%3A%2F%2Fstackoverflow.com/c04ac1f0-cd88-4587-9905-741b90c62684"