[webkit-qt] Phonon and webkit-qt

[Simon Hausmann]

On Monday, January 10, 2011 04:27:40 pm Poulain Benjamin (Nokia-MS-Qt/Oslo) wrote:
> On 01/09/2011 10:19 PM, ext Trever Fischer wrote:
> > Us over in phonon land are wondering about webkit-qt's relationship with
> > Phonon.
> >
> > * Whats the current status of Phonon's integration with webkit-qt?
> > * How can phonon be improved to fit your use cases?
> >
> > We're in #phonon on freenode and i'm idling in #webkit if a more
> > interactive medium is desired.
> 
> I personnaly would not mind both in the tree, Phonon and QtMultimedia, 
> as long as the phonon backup is maintained actively by the Phonon guys.

I agree with Benjamin. I don't see any problem with a Phonon based
backend in the tree as long as it is maintained.

> I understand there is a need from KDE, and I think some guys behind 
> Phonon are not affraid to contribute to WebKit. Trever, do you agree 
> with this statement?
> It would also be good to have more people working on multimedia. The 
> phonon devs could find problems in other backend while making patches.

Yeah, it would be great to have you guys on board hacking on multimedia
stuff :) 
 
> But, is it possible to have three backend (QtMultimedia, GStreamer and 
> Phonon) at the same time in QtWebKit without adding mess in the codebase?
> 
> Simon, Tor Arne, Alexis, any input on the matter?

I can think of two things that are needed for a kick-ass integration with Phonon. There
may be more, but these two I can think of off the top of my head.

1) Support for integration with accelerated compositing. That means Phonon needs
to provide an interface that allows _efficient_ video rendering without the need to have a
QWidget around:

  * The interface could consists of a function that allows rendering into a given QPainter,
and ideally would use things like beginNativePainting() / endNativePainting() where applicable.

  * The interface could provide a QGraphicsItem that can be integrated into the first-generation
QGraphicsView based scene graph.

  * Apart from a software-fallback that allows painting into a QPainter, it would be good to
allow for rendering using OpenGL, i.e. rendering into an FBO that is bound to a texture the
TextureMapper can draw.

2) Phonon would need to provide API that allows WebKit to _push_ data into Phonon.


Can anyone else think of additional requirements that may or may not be covered by
Phonon at the moment?


Simon