Tag: servo

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.

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.

Rust bindings for GStreamerGL: Memoirs

Rust is a great programming language but the community around it’s just amazing. Those are the ingredients for the craft of useful software tools, just like Servo, an experimental browser engine designed for tasks isolation and high parallelization.

Both projects, Rust and Servo, are funded by Mozilla.

Thanks to Mozilla and Igalia I have the opportunity to work on Servo, adding it HTML5 multimedia features.

First, with the help of Fernando Jiménez, we finished what my colleague Philippe Normand and Sebastian Dröge (one of my programming heroes) started: a media player in Rust designed to be integrated in Servo. This media player lives in its own crate: servo/media along with the WebAudio engine. A crate, in Rust jargon, is like a library. This crate is (very ad-hocly) designed to be multimedia framework agnostic, but the only backend right now is for GStreamer. Later we integrated it into Servo adding an initial support for audio and video tags.

Currently, servo/media passes, through a IPC channel, the array with the whole frame to render in Servo. This implies, at least, one copy of the frame in memory, and we would like to avoid it.

For painting and compositing the web content, Servo uses WebRender, a crate designed to use the GPU intensively. Thus, if instead of raw frame data we pass OpenGL textures to WebRender the performance could be enhanced notoriously.

Luckily, GStreamer already supports the uploading, downloading, painting and composition of video frames as OpenGL textures with the OpenGL plugin and its OpenGL Integration library. Even more, with plugins such as GStreamer-VAAPI, Gst-OMX (OpenMAX), and others, it’s possible to process video without using the main CPU or its mapped memory in different platforms.

But from what’s available in GStreamer to what it’s available in Rust there’s a distance. Nonetheless, Sebastian has putting a lot of effort in the Rust bindings for GStreamer, either for applications and plugins, sadly, GStreamer’s OpenGL Integration library (GstGL for short) wasn’t available at that time. So I rolled up my sleeves and got to work on the bindings.

These are the stories of that work.

As GStreamer shares with GTK+ the GObject framework and its introspection mechanism, both projects have collaborated on the required infrastructure to support Rust bindings. Thanks to all the GNOME folks who are working on the intercommunication between Rust and GObject. The quest has been long and complex, since Rust doesn’t map all the object oriented concepts, and GObject, being a set of practices and software helpers to do object oriented programming with C, its usage is not homogeneous.

The Rubicon that ease the generation of Rust bindings for GObject-based projects is GIR, a tool, written in Rust, that reads gir files, along with metadata in toml, and outputs two types of bindings: sys and api.

Rust can call external functions through FFI (foreign function interface), which is just a declaration of a C function with Rust types. But these functions are considered unsafe. The sys bindings, are just the exporting of the C function for the library organized by the library’s namespace.

The next step is to create a safe and rustified API. This is the api bindings.

As we said, GObject libraries are quite homogeneous, and even following the introspection annotations, there will be cases where GIR won’t be able to generate the correct bindings. For that reason GIR is constantly evolving, looking for a common way to solve the corner cases that exist in every GObject project. For example, these are my patches in order to generate the GstGL bindings.

The done tasks were:

For this document we assume that the reader has a functional Rust setup and they know the basic concepts.

Clone and build gir

$ cd ~/ws
$ git clone https://github.com/gtk-rs/gir.git
$ cd gir
$ cargo build --release

The reason to build gir in release mode is because, otherwise would be very slow.

For sys bindings.

These kind of bindings are normally straight forward (and unsafe) since they only map the C API to Rust via FFI mechanism.

$ cd ~/ws
$ git clone https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/gstreamer/gstreamer-rs-sys.git
$ cd gstreamer-rs-sys
$ cp /usr/share/gir-1.0/GstGL-1.0.gir gir-files/
  1. Verify if the gir file is more o less correct
    1. If there something strange, we should fix the code that generated it.
    2. If that is not possible, the last resource is to fix the gir file directly, which is just XML, not manually but through a script using xmlstartlet. See fix.sh in gtk-rs as example.
  2. Create the toml file with the metadata required to create the bindings. In other words, this file contains the exceptions, rules and options used by the tool to generated the bindings. See Gir_GstGL.toml in gstreamer-rs-sys as example. The documentation of the toml file is in the gir’s README.md file.
$ ~/ws/gir/target/release/gir -c Gir_GstGL.toml

This command will generate, as specified in the toml file (target_path), a crate in the directory named gstreamer-gl-sys.

Api bindings.

These type of bindings may require more manual work since their purpose is to offer a rustified API of the library, with all its syntactic sugar, semantics, and so on. But in general terms, the process is similar:

$ cd ~/ws
$ git clone https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/gstreamer/gstreamer-sys.git
$ cd gstreamer-sys
$ cp /usr/share/gir-1.0/GstGL-1.0.gir gir-files/

Again, it would be possible to end up applying fixes to the gir file through a fix.sh script using xmlstartlet.

And again, the confection of the toml file might take a lot of time, by trial and error, by cleaning and tidying up the API. See Gir_GstGL.toml in gstreamer-rs as example.

$ ~/ws/gir/target/release/gir -c Gir_GstGL.toml

A good way to test your bindings is by crafting a test application, which shows how to use the API. Personally I devoted a ton of time in the test application for GstGL, but worth it. It made me aware of a missing part in the crate used for GL applications in Rust, named Glutin, which was a way to get the used EGLDisplay. So also worked on that and sent a pull request that was recently merged. The sweets of the free software development.

Nowadays I’m integrating GstGL API in servo/media and later, Servo!