Tag: eme

Review of Igalia Multimedia activities (2022)

We, Igalia’s multimedia team, would like to share with you our list of achievements along the past 2022.

WebKit Multimedia

WebRTC

Phil already wrote a first blog post, of a series, on this regard: WebRTC in WebKitGTK and WPE, status updates, part I. Please, be sure to give it a glance, it has nice videos.

Long story short, last year we started to support Media Capture and Streams in WebKitGTK and WPE using GStreamer, either for input devices (camera and microphone), desktop sharing, webaudio, and web canvas. But this is just the first step. We are currently working on RTCPeerConnection, also using GStreamer, to share all these captured streams with other web peers. Meanwhile, we’ll wait for the second episode of Phil’s series 🙂

MediaRecorder

We worked in an initial implementation of MediaRecorder with GStreamer (1.20 or superior). The specification goes about allowing a web browser to record a selected stream. For example, a voice-memo or video application which could encode and upload a capture of your microphone / camera.

Gamepad

While WebKitGTK already has Gamepad support, WPE lacked it. We did the implementation last year, and there’s a blog post about it: Gamepad in WPEWebkit, with video showing a demo of it.

Capture encoded video streams from webcams

Some webcams only provide high resolution frames encoded in H.264 or so. In order to support these resolutions with those webcams we added the support for negotiate of those formats and decode them internally to handle the streams. Though we are just at the beginning of more efficient support.

Flatpak SDK maintenance

A lot of effort went to maintain the Flatpak SDK for WebKit. It is a set of runtimes that allows to have a reproducible build of WebKit, independently of the used Linux distribution. Nowadays the Flatpak SDK is used in Webkit’s EWS, and by many developers.

Among all the features added during the year we can highlight added Rust support, a full integrity check before upgrading, and offer a way to override dependencies as local projects.

MSE/EME enhancements

As every year, massive work was done in WebKit ports using GStreamer for Media Source Extensions and Encrypted Media Extensions, improving user experience with different streaming services in the Web, such as Odysee, Amazon, DAZN, etc.

In the case of encrypted media, GStreamer-based WebKit ports provide the stubs to communicate with an external Content Decryption Module (CDM). If you’re willing to support this in your platform, you can reach us.

Also we worked in a video demo showing how MSE/EME works in a Raspberry Pi 3 using WPE:

WebAudio demo

We also spent time recording video demos, such as this one, showing WebAudio using WPE on a desktop computer.

GStreamer

We managed to merge a lot of bug fixes in GStreamer, which in many cases can be harder to solve rather than implementing new features, though former are more interesting to tell, such as those related with making Rust the main developing language for GStreamer besides C.

Rust bindings and GStreamer elements for Vonage Video API / OpenTok

OpenTok is the legacy name of Vonage Video API, and is a PaaS (Platform As a Service) to ease the development and deployment of WebRTC services and applications.

We published our work in Github of Rust bindings both for the Client SDK for Linux and the Server SDK using REST API, along with a GStreamer plugin to publish and subscribe to video and audio streams.

GstWebRTCSrc

In the beginning there was webrtcbin, an element that implements the majority of W3C RTCPeerConnection API. It’s so flexible and powerful that it’s rather hard to use for the most common cases. Then appeared webrtcsink, a wrapper of webrtcbin, written in Rust, which receives GStreamer streams which will be offered and streamed to web peers. Later on, we developed webrtcsrc, the webrtcsink counterpart: an element which source pads push streams from web peers, such as another browser, and forward those Web streams as GStreamer ones in a pipeline. Both webrtcsink and webrtcsrc are written in Rust.

Behavior-Driven Development test framework for GStreamer

Behavior-Driven Development is gaining relevance with tools like Cucumber for Java and its domain specific language, Gherkin to define software behaviors. Rustaceans have picked up these ideas and developed cucumber-rs. The logical consequence was obvious: Why not GStreamer?

Last year we tinkered with GStreamer-Cucumber, a BDD to define behavior tests for GStreamer pipelines.

GstValidate Rust bindings

There have been some discussion if BDD is the best way to test GStreamer pipelines, and there’s GstValidate, and also, last year, we added its Rust bindings.

GStreamer Editing Services

Though not everything was Rust. We work hard on GStreamer’s nuts and bolts.

Last year, we gathered the team to hack GStreamer Editing Services, particularly to explore adding OpenGL and DMABuf support, such as downloading or uploading a texture before processing, and selecting a proper filter to avoid those transfers.

GstVA and GStreamer-VAAPI

We helped in the maintenance of GStreamer-VAAPI and the development of its near replacement: GstVA, adding new elements such as the H.264 encoder, the compositor and the JPEG decoder. Along with participation on the debate and code reviewing of negotiating DMABuf streams in the pipeline.

Vulkan decoder and parser library for CTS

You might have heard about Vulkan has now integrated in its API video decoding, while encoding is currently work-in-progress. We devoted time on helping Khronos with the Vulkan Video Conformance Tests (CTS), particularly with a parser based on GStreamer and developing a H.264 decoder in GStreamer using Vulkan Video API.

You can check the presentation we did last Vulkanised.

WPE Android Experiment

In a joint adventure with Igalia’s Webkit team we did some experiments to port WPE to Android. This is just an internal proof of concept so far, but we are looking forward to see how this will evolve in the future, and what new possibilities this might open up.

If you have any questions about WebKit, GStreamer, Linux video stack, compilers, etc., please contact us.

Review of Igalia Multimedia activities (2020/H2)

As the first quarter of 2021 has aready come to a close, we reckon it’s time to recap our achievements from the second half of 2020, and update you on the improvements we have been making to the multimedia experience on the Web and Linux in general.

Our previous reports:

WPE / WebKitGTK

We have closed ~100 issues related with multimedia in WebKitGTK/WPE, such as fixed seek issues while playback, plugged memory leaks, gardening tests, improved Flatpak-based developing work-flow, enabled new codecs, etc.. Overall, we improved a bit the multimedia’s user experience on these Webkit engine ports.

To highlight a couple tasks, we did some maintenance work on WebAudio backends, and we upstreamed an internal audio mixer, keeping only one connection to the audio server, such as PulseAudio, instead of multiple connections, one for every audio resource. The mixer combines all streams into a single audio server connection.

Adaptive media streaming for the Web (MSE)

We have been working on a new MSE backend for a while, but along the way many related bugs have appeared and they were squashed. Also many code cleanups has been carried out. Though it has been like yak shaving, we are confident that we will reach the end of this long and winding road soonish.

DRM media playback for the Web (EME)

Regarding digital protected media playback, we worked to upstream OpenCDM, support with Widevine, through RDK’s Thunder framework, while continued with the usual maintenance of the others key systems, such as Clear Key, Widevine and PlayReady.

For more details we published a blog post: Serious Encrypted Media Extensions on GStreamer based WebKit ports.

Realtime communications for the Web (WebRTC)

Just as EME, WebRTC is not currently enabled by default in browsers such as Epiphany because license problems, but they are available for custom adopters, and we are maintaining it. For example, we collaborated to upgrade LibWebRTC to M87 and fixed the expected regressions and gardening.

Along the way we experimented a bit with the new GPUProcess for capture devices, but we decided to stop the experimentation while waiting for a broader adoption of the process, for example in graphics rendering, in WPE/WebKitGTK.

GPUProcess work will be retaken at some point, because it’s not, currently, a hard requirement, since we already have moved capture devices handling from the UIProcess to the WebProcess, isolating all GStreamer operations in the latter.

GStreamer

GStreamer is one of our core multimedia technologies, and we contribute on it on a daily basis. We pushed ~400 commits, with similar number of code reviews, along the second half of 2020. Among of those contributions let us highlight the following list:

  • A lot of bug fixing aiming for release 1.18.
  • Reworked and enhanced decodebin3, the GstTranscoder
    API     and encodebin.
  • Merged av1parse in video parsers plugin.
  • Merged qroverlay plugin.
  • Iterated on the mono-repo
    proposal, which requires consensus and coordination among the whole community.
  • gstwpe element has been greatly improved from new user requests.
  • Contributed on the new libgstcodecs library, which enables stateless video decoders through different platforms (for example, v4l2, d3d11, va, etc.).
  • Developed a new plugin for VA-API using this library, exposing H.264, H.265, VP9, VP8, MPEG2 decoders and a full featured postprocessor, with better performance, according our measurements, than GStreamer-VAAPI.

Conferences

Despite 2020 was not a year for conferences, many of them went virtual. We attended one, the Mile high video conference, and participated in the Slack workspace.

Thank you for reading this report and stay tuned with our work.

Review of Igalia Multimedia activities (2020/H1)

This blog post is a review of the various activities the Igalia Multimedia team was involved in during the first half of 2020.

Our previous reports are:

Just before a new virus turned into pandemics we could enjoy our traditional FOSDEM. There, our colleague Phil gave a talk about many of the topics covered in this report.

GstWPE

GstWPE’s wpesrc element, produces a video texture representing a web page rendered off-screen by WPE.

We have worked on a new iteration of the GstWPE demo, focusing on one-to-many, web-augmented overlays, broadcasting with WebRTC and Janus.

Also, since the merge of gstwpe plugin in gst-plugins-bad (staging area for new elements) new users have come along spotting rough areas and improving the element along the way.

Video Editing

GStreamer Editing Services (GES) is a library that simplifies the creation of multimedia editing applications. It is based on the GStreamer multimedia framework and is heavily used by Pitivi video editor.

Implemented frame accuracy in the GStreamer Editing Services (GES)

As required by the industry, it is now possible to reference all time in frame number, providing a precise mapping between frame number and play time. Many issues were fixed in GStreamer to reach the precision enough for make this work. Also intensive regression tests were added.

Implemented time effects support in GES

Important refactoring inside GStreamer Editing Services have happened to allow cleanly and safely change playback speed of individual clips.

Implemented reverse playback in GES

Several issues have been fixed inside GStreamer core elements and base classes in order to support reverse playback. This allows us to implement reliable and frame accurate reverse playback for individual clips.

Implemented ImageSequence support in GStreamer and GES

Since OpenTimelineIO implemented ImageSequence support, many users in the community had said it was really required. We reviewed and finished up imagesequencesrc element, which had been awaiting review for years.

This feature is now also supported in the OpentimelineIO GES adapater.

Optimized nested timelines preroll time by an order of magnitude

Caps negotiation, done while the pipeline transitions from pause state to playing state, testing the whole pipeline functionality, was the bottleneck for nested timelines, so pipelines were reworked to avoid useless negotiations. At the same time, other members of GStreamer community have improved caps negotiation performance in general.

Last but not least, our colleague Thibault gave a talk in The Pipeline Conference about The Motion Picture Industry and Open Source Software: GStreamer as an Alternative, explaining how and why GStreamer could be leveraged in the motion picture industry to allow faster innovation, and solve issues by reusing all the multi-platform infrastructure the community has to offer.

WebKit multimedia

There has been a lot of work on WebKit multimedia, particularly for WebKitGTK and WPE ports which use GStreamer framework as backend.

WebKit Flatpak SDK

But first of all we would like to draw readers attention to the new WebKit Flatpak SDK. It was not a contribution only from the multimedia team, but rather a joint effort among different teams in Igalia.

Before WebKit Flatpak SDK, JHBuild was used for setting up a WebKitGTK/WPE environment for testing and development. Its purpose to is to provide a common set of well defined dependencies instead of relying on the ones available in the different Linux distributions, which might bring different outputs. Nonetheless, Flatpak offers a much more coherent environment for testing and develop, isolated from the rest of the building host, approaching to reproducible outputs.

Another great advantage of WebKit Flatpak SDK, at least for the multimedia team, is the possibility of use gst-build to setup a custom GStreamer environment, with latest master, for example.

Now, for sake of brevity, let us sketch an non-complete list of activities and achievements related with WebKit multimedia.

General multimedia

Media Source Extensions (MSE)

Encrypted Media Extension (EME)

One of the major results of this first half, is the upstream of ThunderCDM, which is an implementation of a Content Decryption Module, providing Widevine decryption support. Recently, our colleague Xabier, published a blog post on this regard.

And it has enabled client-side video rendering support, which ensures video frames remain protected in GPU memory so they can’t be reached by third-party. This is a requirement for DRM/EME.

WebRTC

GStreamer

Though we normally contribute in GStreamer with the activities listed above, there are other tasks not related with WebKit. Among these we can enumerate the following:

GStreamer VAAPI

  • Reviewed a lot of patches.
  • Support for media-driver (iHD), the new VAAPI driver for Intel, mostly for Gen9 onwards. There are a lot of features with this driver.
  • A new vaapioverlay element.
  • Deep code cleanups. Among these we would like to mention:
    • Added quirk mechanism for different backends.
    • Change base classes to GstObject and GstMiniObject of most of classes and buffers types.
  • Enhanced caps negotiation given current driver’s constraints

Conclusions

The multimedia team in Igalia has keep working, along the first half of this strange year, in our three main areas: browsers (mainly on WebKitGTK and WPE), video editing and GStreamer framework.

We worked adding and enhancing WebKitGTK and WPE multimedia features in order to offer a solid platform for media providers.

We have enhanced the Video Editing support in GStreamer.

And, along these tasks, we have contribuited as much in GStreamer framework, particulary in hardware accelerated decoding and encoding and VA-API.

Review of Igalia’s Multimedia Activities (2018/H2)

This is the first semiyearly report about Igalia’s activities around multimedia, covering the second half of 2018.

Great length of this report was exposed in Phil’s talk surveying mutimedia development in WebKitGTK and WPE:

WebKit Media Source Extensions (MSE)

MSE is a specification that allows JS to generate media streams for playback for Web browsers that support HTML 5 video and audio.

Last semester we upstreamed the support to WebM format in WebKitGTK with the related patches in GStreamer, particularly in qtdemux, matroskademux elements.

WebKit Encrypted Media Extensions (EME)

EME is a specification for enabling playback of encrypted content in Web bowsers that support HTML 5 video.

In a downstream project for WPE WebKit we managed to have almost full test coverage in the YoutubeTV 2018 test suite.

We merged our contributions in upstream, WebKit and GStreamer, most of what is legal to publish, for example, making demuxers aware of encrypted content and make them to send protection events with the initialization data and the encrypted caps, in order to select later the decryption key.

We started to coordinate the upstreaming process of a new implementation of CDM (Content Decryption Module) abstraction and there will be even changes in that abstraction.

Lighting talk about EME implementation in WPE/WebKitGTK in GStreamer Conference 2018.

WebKit WebRTC

WebRTC consists of several interrelated APIs and real time protocols to enable Web applications and sites to captures audio, or A/V streams, and exchange them between browsers without requiring an intermediary.

We added GStreamer interfaces to LibWebRTC, to use it for the network part, while using GStreamer for the media capture and processing. All that was upstreamed in 2018 H2.

Thibault described thoroughly the tasks done for this achievement.

Talk about WebRTC implementation in WPE/WebKitGTK in WebEngines hackfest 2018.

Servo/media

Servo is a browser engine written in Rust designed for high parallelization and high GPU usage.

We added basic support for <video> and <audio> media elements in Servo. Later on, we added the GstreamerGL bindings for Rust in gstreamer-rs to render GL textures from the GStreamer pipeline in Servo.

Lighting talk in the GStreamer Conference 2018.

GstWPE

Taking an idea from the GStreamer Conference, we developed a GStreamer source element that wraps WPE. With this source element, it is possible to blend a web page and video in a single video stream; that is, the output of a Web browser (to say, a rendered web page) is used as a video source of a GStreamer pipeline: GstWPE. The element is already merged in the gst-plugins-bad repository.

Talk about GstWPE in FOSDEM 2019

Demo #1

Demo #2

GStreamer VA-API and gst-MSDK

At last, but not the least, we continued helping with the maintenance of GStreamer-VAAPI and gst-msdk, with code reviewing and on-going migration of the internal library to GObject.

Other activities

The second half of 2018 was also intense in terms of conferences and hackfest for the team:

Thanks to bear with us along all this blog post and to keeping under your radar our work.