G-Streamer For Google's Chrome Proposed But Denied

[phoronix]

Phoronix: G-Streamer For Google's Chrome Proposed But Denined

In early December a beta of Google Chrome for Linux was released (though Chromium could be built on Linux in an alpha form for months earlier) while just days prior was the first public code release of Google's Chromium OS. Google's Chrome web-browser has been quick to attract new users on Linux thanks to its speed and features, but some are having issues with this web-browser over its multimedia support.To provide multimedia support within the Chrome / Chromium web-browser for enabling HTML5 video support, FFmpeg is hooked in at build-time...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=NzkxNQ

[FireBurn]

Chromium / Chrome can be configure to use the system ffmpeg

It's up to the distros to make sure that their users can get this installed when required

Not twist Google's arm to use Gstreamer which will simply use the ffmpeg libraries anyway

[koorogi]

G-Streamer also supports a variety of hardware acceleration methods like VA-API, VDPAU, XvMC, and even DxVA for Windows users.

This doesn't clearly say it, but I read it to imply that FFmpeg does not support hardware acceleration, which is not true. I don't think it supports DxVA, but it supports the rest.

Also, there is nothing in FFmpeg that makes plugin support difficult. It doesn't provide it out of the box, but it should be pretty trivial:

1. Load library containing the plugin code
2. Call avcodec_register for the codec
3. Play back video using the codec

FFmpeg already provides everything required except the logic to find the libraries containing external codecs.

[Chewi]

I'm not entirely sure if this would work but if FFmpeg is linked as a shared library, what's to stop users replacing it with a more "complete" version. Chrome shouldn't have to be rebuilt? This would effectively be little different to downloading additional plugins.

[cb88]

Build it in static duh...

seriously for releases it should be built in staically and otherwise it is up to the distro and out of google's hands this is exactly what opera does with QT

common horse sence.

[Chewi]

Build it in static duh...

seriously for releases it should be built in staically and otherwise it is up to the distro and out of google's hands this is exactly what opera does with QT

common horse sence.

I'd consider that bad practise. Do most people even use the static version of Opera? I don't and I haven't seen many that do. I find it runs noticeably slower.

[kernelOfTruth]

G-Streamer For Google's Chrome Proposed But Denined

should read

G-Streamer For Google's Chrome Proposed But Denied

no ?

[ethana2]

I just want to install OS 10.04 Lynx over OS 10.4 Tiger on my G4 and still be able to watch Youtube videos. If V8 ran on PPC, I wouldn't care about this all that much... Will Webkit Epiphany be able to play H264 through the system media framework? I'd rather not use Firefox as it doesn't work with gnome-globalmenu.

[cruiseoveride]

Thanks god.

[smitty3268]

Epiphany's entire mission is to integrate with GNOME, so I'm sure it will use GStreamer.

If the distros really think this is important, it shouldn't be that difficult to fork Chromium and provide the GStreamer support, should it? I don't see that happening because it shouldn't really be needed. As others have said, they should be able to work around these issues with FFmpeg without completely switching frameworks to GStreamer.