Tag: ges

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 the Igalia Multimedia team Activities (2019/H2)

This blog post is a review of the various activities the Igalia Multimedia team was involved along the second half of 2019.

Here are the previous 2018/H2 and 2019/H1 reports.

GstWPE

Succinctly, GstWPE is a GStreamer plugin which allows to render web-pages as a video stream where it frames are GL textures.

Phil, its main author, wrote a blog post explaning at detail what is GstWPE and its possible use-cases. He wrote a demo too, which grabs and previews a live stream from a webcam session and blends it with an overlay from wpesrc, which displays HTML content. This composited live stream can be broadcasted through YouTube or Twitch.

These concepts are better explained by Phil himself in the following lighting talk, presented at the last GStreamer Conference in Lyon:

Video Editing

After implementing a deep integration of the GStreamer Editing Services (a.k.a GES) into Pixar’s OpenTimelineIO during the first half of 2019, we decided to implement an important missing feature for the professional video editing industry: nested timelines.

Toward that goal, Thibault worked with the GSoC student Swayamjeet Swain to implement a flexible API to support nested timelines in GES. This means that users of GES can now decouple each scene into different projects when editing long videos. This work is going to be released in the upcoming GStreamer 1.18 version.

Henry Wilkes also implemented the support for nested timeline in OpenTimelineIO making GES integration one of the most advanced one as you can see on that table:

Feature OTIO EDL FCP7 XML FCP X AAF RV ALE GES
Single Track of Clips ✔ ✔ ✔ ✔ ✔ W-O ✔ ✔
Multiple Video Tracks ✔ ✖ ✔ ✔ ✔ W-O ✔ ✔
Audio Tracks & Clips ✔ ✔ ✔ ✔ ✔ W-O ✔ ✔
Gap/Filler ✔ ✔ ✔ ✔ ✔ ✔ ✖ ✔
Markers ✔ ✔ ✔ ✔ ✖ N/A ✖ ✔
Nesting ✔ ✖ ✔ ✔ ✔ W-O ✔ ✔
Transitions ✔ ✔ ✖ ✖ ✔ W-O ✖ ✔
Audio/Video Effects ✖ ✖ ✖ ✖ ✖ N/A ✖ ✔
Linear Speed Effects ✔ ✔ ✖ ✖ R-O ✖ ✖ ✖
Fancy Speed Effects ✖ ✖ ✖ ✖ ✖ ✖ ✖ ✖
Color Decision List ✔ ✔ ✖ ✖ ✖ ✖ N/A ✖

Along these lines, Thibault delivered a 15 minutes talk, also in the GStreamer Conference 2019:

After detecting a few regressions and issues in GStreamer, related to frame accuracy, we decided to make sure that we can seek in a perfectly frame accurate way using GStreamer and the GStreamer Editing Services. In order to ensure that, an extensive integration testsuite has been developed, mostly targeting most important container formats and codecs (namely mxf, quicktime, h264, h265, prores, jpeg) and issues have been fixed in different places. On top of that, new APIs are being added to GES to allow expressing times in frame number instead of nanoseconds. This work is still ongoing but should be merged in time for GStreamer 1.18.

GStreamer Validate Flow

GstValidate has been turning into one of the most important GStreamer testing tools to check that elements behave as they are supposed to do in the framework.

Along with our MSE work, we found that other way to specify tests, related with produced buffers and events through specific pads, was needed. Thus, Alicia developed a new plugin for GstValidate: Validate Flow.

Alicia gave an informative 30 minutes talk about GstValidate and the new plugin in the last GStreamer Conference too:

GStreamer VAAPI

Most of the work along the second half of 2019 were maintenance tasks and code reviews.

We worked mainly on memory restrictions per backend driver, and we reviewed a big refactor: internal encoders now use GstObject, instead of the custom GstVaapiObject. Also we reviewed patches for new features such as video rotation and cropping in vaapipostproc.

Servo multimedia

Last year we worked integrating media playing in Servo. We finally delivered hardware accelerated video playback in Linux and Android. We worked also for Windows and Mac ports but they were not finished. As natural, most of the work were in servo/media crate, pushing code and reviewing contributions. The major tasks were to rewrite the media player example and the internal source element looking to handle the download playbin‘s flag properly.

We also added WebGL integration support with <video> elements, thus webpages can use video frames as WebGL textures.

Finally we explored how to isolate the multimedia processing in a dedicated thread or process, but that task remains pending.

WebKit Media Source Extension

We did a lot of downstream and upstream bug fixing and patch review, both in WebKit and GStreamer, for our MSE GStreamer-based backend.

Along this line we improved WebKitMediaSource to use playbin3 but also compatibility with older GStreamer versions was added.

WebKit WebRTC

Most of the work in this area were maintenance and fix regressions uncovered by the layout tests. Besides, the support for the Rasberry Pi was improved by handling encoded streams from v4l2 video sources, with some explorations with Minnowboard on top of that.

Conferences

GStreamer Conference

Igalia was Gold sponsor this last GStreamer Conference held in Lyon, France.

All team attended and five talks were delivered. Only Thibault presented, besides the video editing one which we already referred, another two more: One about GstTranscoder API and the other about the new documentation infrastructure based in Hotdoc:

We also had a productive hackfest, after the conference, where we worked on AV1 Rust decoder, HLS Rust demuxer, hardware decoder flag in playbin, and other stuff.

Linaro Connect

Phil attended the Linaro Connect conference in San Diego, USA. He delivered a talk about WPE/Multimedia which you can enjoy here:

Demuxed

Charlie attended Demuxed, in San Francisco. The conference is heavily focused on streaming and codec engineering and validation. Sadly there are not much interest in GStreamer, as the main focus is on FFmpeg.

RustFest

Phil and I attended the last RustFest in Barcelona. Basically we went to meet with the Rust community and we attended the “WebRTC with GStreamer-rs” workshop presented by Sebastian Dröge.