Kodi Is Working On Chromium CEF Integration

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Kodi Is Working On Chromium CEF Integration

A Kodi developer has started working on integrating Google's Chrome Embedded Framework (CEF) browser layout/rendering engine into Kodi. If successful in embedding this Chromium code into the Kodi HTPC software, new doors could be opened up and it would open up a lot of new possibilities...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Kodi-Chrome-Embedded

[ernstp]

Would be cool if this could enable NetFlix support.

[sarmad]

I hope this won't slow down Kodi's smooth UI animations. When Sony replaced their native PSN Store with an HTML5 based store framerate took a nose dive.

[Daktyl198]

Oh god no...

I have nothing against the CEF... if you're using it for it's browsing capabilities. For the love of god, when will people learn to stop using HTML/CSS to rendering their UIs on complicated programs??
Not to mention that simply having the CEF running in your application can increase the ram usage by ~400+MB, and that's not counting all of the in-depth JavaScript, animations, etc.
Please Kodi... don't do it

[johnc]

web-based solutions are awful for the end user experience

[johnc]

For the love of god, when will people learn to stop using HTML/CSS to rendering their UIs on complicated programs??

It's impossible to fight the fads in the tech industry.

[liam]

Oh god no...

I have nothing against the CEF... if you're using it for it's browsing capabilities. For the love of god, when will people learn to stop using HTML/CSS to rendering their UIs on complicated programs??
Not to mention that simply having the CEF running in your application can increase the ram usage by ~400+MB, and that's not counting all of the in-depth JavaScript, animations, etc.
Please Kodi... don't do it

Have you looked at recent benchmarking of native vs web ui?
I haven't found much, but I'd expect native to be more responsive. However, that's a gap that has been closing. Web has been getting better, and better interfaces. Projects like Ganesh and whatever the mozilla one is called are necessary to really get to that last mile (assuming the we don't get something to just replace the dom).

[liam]

Oh god no...

I have nothing against the CEF... if you're using it for it's browsing capabilities. For the love of god, when will people learn to stop using HTML/CSS to rendering their UIs on complicated programs??
Not to mention that simply having the CEF running in your application can increase the ram usage by ~400+MB, and that's not counting all of the in-depth JavaScript, animations, etc.
Please Kodi... don't do it

Hmm, not sure if my post went through. It sure isn't showing up rignt now...


Have you looked at recent benchmarking of native vs web ui? I'm genuinely curious b/c I haven't found much outside the infamously poor facebook app a few years ago.
The gap has been closing as far as responsiveness goes, and while js may use a lot of memory, the engines are great at reclaiming it (likewise, if you have the space, they'll cache all the fast paths they can).
Even true shm threading is on its way.
The web certainly needs more development, but it's finally starting to grow the apis it needs to interface with the os meaningfully.

[liam]

Oh god no...

I have nothing against the CEF... if you're using it for it's browsing capabilities. For the love of god, when will people learn to stop using HTML/CSS to rendering their UIs on complicated programs??
Not to mention that simply having the CEF running in your application can increase the ram usage by ~400+MB, and that's not counting all of the in-depth JavaScript, animations, etc.
Please Kodi... don't do it

Have you read any recent benchmarks comparing native vs. web interfaces? I'm genuinely curious b/c I've not found any.
My expectations would be that native is still noticeably faster for things like touch, but on the desktop, and when you aren't dragging an object, I'd expect the difference to be very slight. This is something that has improved greatly, and I'd expect the gap to get even smaller, esp considering projects like ganesh and servo (this is ignoring the possible reimagining of the dom itself to something more like display lists).
As the web grows more robust apis that allow further engagement with the os I'd expect the difference to disappear in all but edge cases/benchmarking (even that may go away if effort continues to be directed towards making the web a first class dev platform).
As for js, keep in mind that modern js engines will use all the ram they can to store the expensive fast paths, but they are also designed to adapt to memory pressure. An interesting test would be to look at native vs web UIs in memory constrained environments (say, less than 1G).

[Harley]

I hope this won't slow down Kodi's smooth UI animations.

It won't, as if you read the project page and team developer Alwinus (Alwin Esch) comments in the Kodi forums you know that his initial plan is really only to enable web addons/plugins, and not to replace the skinning engine with an HTML layout renderer.

http://forum.kodi.tv/showthread.php?tid=231545

http://forum.kodi.tv/showthread.php?tid=220842

For the love of god, when will people learn to stop using HTML/CSS to rendering their UIs on complicated programs?

Don't worry, understand that this will probably not replace anything in Kodi on the skinning side but instead only extend the addons APIs to offer more options for addon and plugin developers. That means that unless the user actually chooise use one of the web addons then Kodi will not even load the CEF web engine into memory to use it as it will be a binary addon that will only loaded on demand when a web addon is started by the user.

Again read the above forum thread discussion as well as the descriptions on the project pages:

http://esmasol.de/open-source/kodi-a...m-web-browser/

https://bitbucket.org/kodi-web

https://github.com/kodi-web/chromium-cef-bin-creator

Would be cool if this could enable NetFlix support.

Unfortuantly this alone will not enable playback of encrypted media directly, but is it a dependecy and a requirement for it to be possible to add it too in the future, so at least its a great start and a first step in a long process to achieve support for encrypted media.

https://w3c.github.io/encrypted-media/

The next steps to be able to achite that would be to add a HTML5 video player and support for the EME (Encrypted Media Extensions) API with CDM (Content Decryption Module) and after that comes the hardest step which would be to convince the Netflix company to add their private keys for it to be added legally to Kodi.