HTML cuechange DOM Event: Reference and Examples

When someone interacts with a webpage, the browser sends events to the relevant JavaScript code. The cuechange event happens when the active text-track cues for media change.

When cuechange happens

The active text-track cues for media change.

You can listen for it using addEventListener(). That keeps event handling separate from HTML attributes such as onclick and works well with modern code organization.

A small working example

<video controls width="320">
    <source src="lesson.mp4" type="video/mp4">
    <track id="demo-target" src="captions.vtt" kind="captions" srclang="en" label="English">
</video>
<p id="event-status" role="status">Waiting for cuechange...</p>
<script>
    const eventTarget = document.getElementById("demo-target");
    const eventStatus = document.getElementById("event-status");

    if (eventTarget) {
        eventTarget.addEventListener("cuechange", (eventDetails) => {
            eventStatus.textContent = "cuechange event received";
            console.log(eventDetails.type, eventDetails.target);
        });
    }
</script>

Reading the code

The browser listens for cuechange on the relevant target. When the event occurs, the callback receives eventDetails, updates the status message and logs the event name and target in Developer Tools.

Provide a real WebVTT subtitle file and play through a cue boundary.

The text track can expose activeCues when a cue becomes active or inactive.

To test this example, put a real supported media file at the shown path. Events tied to buffering or download behavior may not fire in the same order on every connection. An unavailable sample file is not proof that your event listener is broken.

Try it in your browser

Open the page, show the Console panel, and follow this test: Provide a real WebVTT subtitle file and play through a cue boundary. Then change one thing in the example and observe whether the event still fires.

Common Beginner Mistakes

• Expecting cuechange to fire without its required user action or browser condition.
• Provide a real WebVTT subtitle file and play through a cue boundary.
• Adding repeated event listeners without considering cleanup or unwanted side effects.

Key Takeaways

• cuechange reports the active text-track cues for media change.
• addEventListener("cuechange", ...) listens for the event on the appropriate target.
• Provide a real WebVTT subtitle file and play through a cue boundary.