HTML5 Video poster attribute in Safari and Chrome

It seems that WebKit strips the attribute as soon as the video is fethced, because iOS 3.x for Iphone and Ipad has a serious bug where it is not possible to play the video at all when there is a poster attribute specified. This was fixed in iOS 4, but the workaround still stays, even in Safari 5...There are a lot of users who didn't upgrade to iOS 4 yet, so no luck with the poster...

I'm going to try and position the image absolutely over the video using Javascript, and removing it when the video is played - that seems like the best solution...

If you can get away with not preloading the video you can set preload="none" on the video element. In Safari this results in the poster being displayed.

Safari on iOS probably sets preload="none" as the default to save bandwidth, while the desktop version preloads unless you explicitly tell it not to.