Playing HTML 5 video from Angular 2 Typescript

Problem is you're trying to get a reference to video element using its id. You need to use template reference variable (#) instead:

<div class="video">
    <video controls (click)="toggleVideo()" #videoPlayer>
        <source src="{{videoSource}}" type="video/mp4" />
        Browser not supported
    </video>
</div>

Read more about template reference variable here.

Edit:

Also, in your toggleVideo(event: any) function, you need to get nativeElement and then call the play() function because you are accessing DOM element directly:

@ViewChild('videoPlayer') videoplayer: ElementRef;

toggleVideo(event: any) {
    this.videoplayer.nativeElement.play();
}

Credits to @peeskillet for this one.


Others have already answered the basic question (you must use nativeElement). However, since nativeElement is of type any you should 'cast' it to a more specific element type (for the <video> tag this is HTMLVideoElement).

 const video: HTMLVideoElement = this.videoElement.nativeElement;
 video.play();

This then gives you intellisense for all the supported methods and properties.

And of course this is all just compile time - you're not converting anything and you'll still get an error if the element is not really a video.