A suggestion for temporarily solving lack of HTML5 media support

Feedback Ideas
1

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?

2

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.

3

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?

3 Likes
4

Yes.
And the Inc has some money to spare.
Would it be sensible to ask the Inc to put a bounty on solving this crippling (for me) bug ?

2 Likes
5

I have WIP WebKit drag&drop support, some improvements of WebKit graphics API to BView graphics API mapping.

Proper HTML5 video support will require implementing missing WebKit interfaces and maybe fixing Haiku Media Kit.

12 Likes
6

8 posts were split to a new topic: Contributing and decision-making

7

I reported the problem to the youtube bug-tracker as you adviced me to do.
They said: The problem/bug is not feasable!

https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/174231591

Changed
status: New → Infeasible

8

I fixed recent regression with broken JavaScript timer events like requestAnimationFrame. See patch in #16609 (WebKit rebased - gerrit blank white page) – Haiku.

4 Likes
9

I was wondering why HTML5 (youtube videos) still works on R1/B2 and is broken on the Nightly releases ?

I’m not a developer, so can someone who knows the reason explain it in layman terms ?

Thanks.

10

In case you haven’t been following, Web+ originally used a single threaded webkit. Now they are switching to a multithreaded version.

11

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.

12

Thanks to both of you.

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.

13

I was wondering why HTML5 (youtube videos) still works on R1/B2 and is broken on the Nightly releases ?

This bug: #16535 (Youtube playback and decoding issue) – Haiku

A few people are looking into debugging Haiku’s Webkit port (now at v611.1.7)…

See: https://discuss.haiku-os.org/t/haiku-webkit-port-patchset

14

Thanks @cocobean, I was aware of that thread, but it was a bit too technical for me.

Rereading it with the above additional information, it makes way more sense now.

15

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.