What about this scenario? When the WebPositive browser tries to play the video, it adds it to the “Media” menu in the bar. “Media” menu would have options to save or temporarily download the video (like UberTuber).
Or, on supported sites, there will be button to download the video using youtube-dl.
What do you think about it? Are there chances it will be introduced to Haiku?
I see where your idea is going, but IMO it’s a risky decision: media companies and music labels could sue Haiku if such a feature was implemented due to copyright laws (people can use the download button to download copyrighted content), and it isn’t worth it risking it for HTML5 media support; youtube-dl was the subject of a DMCA takedown not long ago.
What about fixing the bug in WebKit and making videos work? It can’t be that hard? Why add an ugly workaround when the real code is that easy to write? Why is no one contributing to the WebKit port?
Nightlies are development releases, they are in constant evolution. Here devs are trying things that will be or not in next beta. Things can be broken anytime. When updating a library to a newer version containing fixes and improvements sometimes long awaited, it happens that things get broken in one or several software depending on it. Sometimes, all you need is to rebuild software depending on that library with the new version. Sometimes software need to be adapted to the new version. Sometimes it’s the new version that is bugged and needs fixing. Every update of this kind, you need to do a lot of testing, and to decide if it’s worthy or not to update. Hopefully, most of time, it goes well and you avoid headaches.
In this particular case, it seems that a newer version of webkit broke videos reading.
Once in a while, devs are deciding that things are stable enough and there has been enough improvements to release something. At this point, they are copying what is in nightlies and are fixing bugs and polishing things in the copy. When they are happy with the results, it can be few months later, they publish this as beta.
Even, if beta also has updates, they are in big majority bugfixes. Devs are paying a lot of attention to not break things and so that the beta remains stable.
It is now crystal clear why it’s not working on the Nightlies and I have a better understanding on the difficulties facing the developers on this particular instance.
We are not doing that yet. There was some work during Google Summer of Code but it was not integrated (still too many bugs, it would crash on most pages except Google homepage)
Beta2 (with updates) and nightlies run the same version of WebKit, as they get it from HaikuDepot which doesn’t have a stable branch. So the difference is elsewhere.