This weekend I’ll be in Node5 (Prague) presenting our Media Source Extensions platform implementation work in WebKit using GStreamer.

The Media Source Extensions HTML5 specification allows JavaScript to generate media streams for playback and lets the web page have more control on complex use cases such as adaptive streaming.

My plan for the talk is to start with a brief introduction about the motivation and basic usage of MSE. Next I’ll show a design overview of the WebKit implementation of the spec. Then we’ll go through the iterative evolution of the GStreamer platform-specific parts, as well as its implementation quirks and challenges faced during the development. The talk continues with a demo, some clues about the future work and a final round of questions.

Our recent MSE work has been on desktop WebKitGTK+ (the WebKit version powering the Epiphany, aka: GNOME Web), but we also have MSE working on WPE and optimized for a Raspberry Pi 2. We will be showing it in the Igalia booth, in case you want to see it working live.

I’ll be also attending the GStreamer Hackfest the days before. There I plan to work on webm support in MSE, focusing on any issue in the Matroska demuxer or the vp9/opus/vorbis decoders breaking our use cases.

See you there!

UPDATE 2017-10-22:

The talk slides are available at https://eocanha.org/talks/gstconf2017/gstconf-2017-mse.pdf and the video is available at https://gstconf.ubicast.tv/videos/media-source-extension-on-webkit (the rest of the talks here).

A lot of good things have happened to the Media Source Extensions support since my last post, almost a year ago.

The most important piece of news is that the code upstreaming has kept going forward at a slow, but steady pace. The amount of code Igalia had to port was pretty big. Calvaris (my favourite reviewer) and I considered that the regular review tools in WebKit bugzilla were not going to be enough for a good exhaustive review. Instead, we did a pre-review in GitHub using a pull request on my own repository. It was an interesting experience, because the change set was so large that it had to be (artificially) divided in smaller commits just to avoid reaching GitHub diff display limits.

394 GitHub comments later, the patches were mature enough to be submitted to bugzilla as child bugs of Bug 157314 – [GStreamer][MSE] Complete backend rework. After some comments more in bugzilla, they were finally committed during Web Engines Hackfest 2016:

Some unforeseen regressions in the layout tests appeared, but after a couple of commits more, all the mediasource WebKit tests were passing. There are also some other tests imported from W3C, but I kept them still skipped because webm support was needed for many of them. I’ll focus again on that set of tests at its due time.

Igalia is proud of having brought the MSE support up to date to WebKitGTK+. Eventually, this will improve the browser video experience for a lot of users using Epiphany and other web browsers based on that library. Here’s how it enables the usage of YouTube TV at 1080p@30fps on desktop Linux:

Our future roadmap includes bugfixing and webm/vp9+opus support. This support is important for users from countries enforcing patents on H.264. The current implementation can’t be included in distros such as Fedora for that reason.

As mentioned before, part of this upstreaming work happened during Web Engines Hackfest 2016. I’d like to thank our sponsors for having made this hackfest possible, as well as Metrological for giving upstreaming the importance it deserves.

Thank you for reading.

During 2014 I started to become interested on how GStreamer was used in WebKit to play media content and how it was related to Media Source Extensions (MSE). Along 2015, my company Igalia strenghtened its cooperation with Metrological to enhance the multimedia support in their customized version of WebKitForWayland, the web platform they use for their products for the set-top box market. This was an opportunity to do really interesting things in the multimedia field on a really nice hardware platform: Raspberry Pi.

In the previous posts we learnt how to code and debug Chromium for Android C++ code from Eclipse. In this post I’m going to explain how to open the ChromeShell Java code, so that you will be able to hack on it like you would in a normal Android app project. Remember, you will need to install the ADT plugin in Eclipse  and the full featured adb which comes with the standalone SDK from the official page. Don’t try to reuse the android sdk in “third_party/android_tools/sdk”.

In the previous post, I showed all the references to get the Chromium for Android source code, setup Eclipse and build the ChromeShell app. Today I’m going to explain how to debug that app running in the device.

In the Chromium Developers website has some excellent resources on how to setup an environment to build Chromium for Linux desktop and for Android. There’s also a detailed guide on how to setup Eclipse as your development environment, enabling you to take advantage of code indexing and enjoy features such as type hierarchy, call hierarchy, macro expansion, references and a lot of tools much better than the poor man’s trick of grepping the code.

Over the last months I’ve been working in several projects, switched laptop and reinstalled my main distribution several times. Having to replicate the development environment one time after another and reinstall the compiler, tools, editor and all sorts of dependencies that stain a desktop distribution is a major nuisance. In the worst case, things won’t work as before due to incompatibilities of the new distribution. And what about bringing new developers to a complex project with a lot of dependencies which are difficult to track? The new team member can spend days trying to replicate the development environment of the rest of the team.

This post explains how to compile C source code for Android using the Native Development Kit (NDK) by using autotools to set up the building infrastructure and using androgenizer to convert that autotools infrastructure into Android.mk files understood by the ndk-build tool. I’ll first review some autotools concepts very quickly trough examples and iterate over them.

After months of collaborative work of a multidisciplinary team directed by Rafael Ibáñez and with the participation of Igalia, version 1.0 of Libertexto project is finally out.

Libertexto is a Mozilla Firefox extension that allows the user to perform typical text comprehension tasks on electronic documents in the same way they’re performed on printed documents. Such tasks include highlighting, annotation, tagging, multimedia content linking, organization and exporting. The extension comes in two flavours: a lightweight version that only supports HTML pages and a full version that also supports PDF documents.

There aren’t many open source tools able to annotate PDF documents out there, so I’m convinced that Libertexto will satisfy a growing demand for this feature. To accomplish the goal, some customizations have been developed on top of Evince 2.28.0 to make it able to communicate with the Firefox extension and to manage the document annotations both in Windows and in GNU/Linux. Evince is embedded into Firefox by a custom plugin that is responsible for launching it and preparing the environment for the window embedding. For the curious readers, more technical details about the embedding process can be found in a previous post about Libertexto.

With this contribution, we expect all the reader community in the Spanish speaking world (the only language available by now) to have a new and powerful tool for text comprehension and commenting. Enjoy it!

UPDATE 7/3/2011:

At some point all the code sould be put together for proper download, but by now it’s scattered among different locations: The source code of the Firefox extension itself can be got by unzipping the XPI file. The source code of the modifications done over Evince can be got from gitorious and the source code of the PDF plugin can be got from here.

UPDATE 3/6/2011:

The new Libertexto 1.1 version is ready for download at libertexto.org. It corrects some compatibility problems with Firefox 4 in Linux, WinXP, Vista and Win7. If it seems that the install doesn’t work directly from the link, just download the file to the desktop and then drag&drop it to Firefox. An experimental version newer than 1.1 is also available in /dev/libertexto/libertexto.xpi. It fixes a bug that prevents the extension to work when the user account name had more than 8 characters, due to a path length limitation in Firefox on Windows.

I’ve recalled about my old Shishen Sho game, originally developed for N810 (Maemo4) and I was wondering if it would compile for N900 (Maemo5). Well, after some minor corrections to make it work in a more recent version of Vala, it compiled. You can downloaded it here:

https://garage.maemo.org/frs/download.php/7573/shishensho_0.3.1-maemo5_armel.deb

Disclaimer: It’s compiled “as is”, with no adaption for sliding menus, no new hardware keys and no new fancy features. It just works and will let you have a good time while waiting for the bus.