Video Inside An IMG Tag

plugins and media 1996 dead

Internet Explorer let you point an image at an AVI file and play it on mouseover.

In 2026: Dead, and it only ever worked in Internet Explorer on Windows. Netscape users saw the still from the SRC attribute, which is why every page using it needed both. This is the closest the 90s web got to a video tag.

Where it came from: Microsoft Internet Explorer 2 HTML extensions, 1996. MDN ↗

<!-- IE plays the AVI. Everyone else sees still.gif. -->
<img src="https://xbawx.com/inc/img/demo/photo.jpg" dynsrc="clips/wave.avi"
     start="mouseover" loop="infinite" controls
     width="320" height="240" alt="Waving">

<!-- start="fileopen" played it as soon as the page loaded -->
<img src="https://xbawx.com/inc/img/demo/photo.jpg" dynsrc="clips/intro.avi"
     start="fileopen" loop="2" width="320" height="240" alt="">

<!-- The 2026 version -->
<video src="clips/wave.mp4" poster="https://xbawx.com/inc/img/demo/photo.jpg" loop muted controls
       width="320" height="240"></video>

sandboxed demo · breaks nothing but itselfrestart

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