[opensource-dev] Replacement for QuickTime media plugin - a straw man proposal

[Henri Beauchamp]

On Wed, 18 May 2016 21:49:46 -0700, Darien Caldwell wrote:

> Using CEF for media is what I've been saying since CEF support was
> announced for the viewer. I think it would be a clean solution.

That solution would be plain *dirty* and totally wasteful (about 80Mb
per new CEF plugin instance), it would also be a big issue for old
computers and 32 bits OSes (and yes, there are still people using
those, mind you !).

Like I wrote in this list in an earlier message, using the CEF plugin
to play streaming shared media is plain YUCK !

> The viewer already runs 3 instances of CEF at startup,

Speak for your viewer... The Cool VL Viewer doesn't have any CEF
(or QtWebkit, since it can also still use that one, for Windows XP
users, who can't have a working CEF: the Windows CEF pre-built
library is not compiled any more to support Windows XP...) plugin
running unless there is a web media/UI element open.

> using one of those for media wouldn't really add any additional load.

You would need *one instance per shared media face*, not just one for
all shared media around !

It would be tremendously wasteful of resources and would slow down
things (CEF needs to refresh its frames 60 times per second, and it's
not especially speedy when compared to a plain video stream played
via gstreamer or VLC, the latter two also be playing the stream only
at its native frame rate, never more).

> The viewer is already using something else (FMODEX maybe) for MP3, as
> it works without Quicktime installed.

Yes, using FMOD Ex for playing plain sound shared media is an option,
but since the latter are rather rare (audio streams in SL are usually
played via the parcel streaming music channel), it would be acceptable
to use gstreamer (which is not much more more wasteful than FMOD and is
also, by designed, adapated to plain sound stream playin) or vlc (there
would likeley be wome wastage here, since AFAIK vlc is primarily designed
to play video streams).

Henri.