WebKit Video in Windows

I’m attempting to get HTML5 video working in WebKit and not having much luck. My various attempts works perfectly on the Mac and don’t in Windows. This leads me to believe that that Windows version is just ‘different’. Looking through documentation they have the ‘WebKitPlugins’ property with this description: [quote]To make plugins available to WebKit on Windows, create a folder called WebKitPlugins within your Libs folder in your application folder and place the plugins you need there.[/quote]

So what the heck does that really mean?

Has anyone gotten video to successfully play in Windows webkit? Any tricks to success?

On Windows you have Chromium in an older version, not the same WebKit as on Mac.

Bob, do you have to use the Chromium browser engine? I ask, as I’m able to get very good (but not perfect) performance under the IE11 engine : https://forum.xojo.com/28645-high-performance-video-movie-playback-in-win32

(I’m intersted in your experiences - I might be willing to switch from the native engine to Chromium if it were vastly better)

Let me give a little background on this project. The client is streaming video from his website into his application. For several years we’ve used the VideoPlayer without too many issues except a small percentage of Windows users. These users can’t view these mp4 videos regardless of updates and they’re spread throughout the Windows OS spectrum so it’s not just a single release.

In other parts of the app we’ve had some success using WebKit instead of the standard IE engine so we’re investigating this area too. So far, without much success.

The problem I’m having with the IE engine, so far, is that instead of just playing the video it wants to open it in Windows Media Player which is a non-starter for the client.

Now that I’ve ready the other thread I can say that our experience with VLC was overwhelmingly negative. Sure, in our test cases where Windows users couldn’t view video through the native video player were able to view them through the VLC there were a lot of complaints from other users where the VLC video player either wouldn’t play it at all, played sound only, or it was so jittery as to be unusable.

We did all the requisite tweaks that we knew of, tested on multiple Windows VM and multiples actual Windows hardware with a variety of operating systems. In the long run user sentiment was so negative we had to revert to the previous version.

So this is the result of trying to find an alternative to the native video players and VLC.

It’s relatively easy to test IE11, just write some plain HTML with a HTML5

We also need to play .mp3 sounds and .mp4 videos in the WebKit HTML viewer. We can’t use the native/IE HTML viewer for this project as the native viewer has numerous problems/limitations when viewing local content. Fortunately, since we are viewing local content and since our tools create that content, I was able to find a solution that works. It’s not ideal, but is workable.
(Of course, if we weren’t viewing local content, we could use the native/IE player or just launch the browser.)

Here is what we did for sound/video in the WebKit HTML viewer:

  1. For .mp3 sounds, I modify the sounds links, passing the .mp3 path to the host Xojo program, which plays the sound (with or without a controller.)

  2. For “floating” .mp4 video, I pass the .mp4 path to the host Xojo program, which plays the video in a window through Xojo.
    NOTE: The above two are via Javascript on the HTML page that changes the page title (which is not visible to the end user) to a string that includes the name of the file to be played. The host program watches the page title and–when it changes to one of my pre-defined string types, it finds/plays the specified media file.
    NOTE: Modification of the HTML page is done via a combination of prep of the HTML files from our production/packaging tools and some modification of the HTML while loading into the HTML viewer.

  3. For “in place” .mp4 video (video embedded in the HTML page), I modify the HTML to embed the video using QuickTime.
    a. Of course, the user must have QuickTime installed, but many do.
    b. And, we include a link to install QuickTime.

The first two options work fine. I’m less happy with the requirement for QuickTime on Windows installs, but until/unless we can find some better alternative for a HTML viewer that will “play nice” with local content AND will play .mp3/.mp4 files, this may be the best we can do.

If anyone does find a way to add plugins to the WebKit HTML viewer to allow play of .mp3 and .mp4 files, I would be VERY interested in hearing how they did it. Actually, I would pay for a solution or instructions as I would very much like to drop the need for QuickTime on Windows.

[quote=235677:@Bob Keeney]I’m attempting to get HTML5 video working in WebKit and not having much luck. My various attempts works perfectly on the Mac and don’t in Windows. This leads me to believe that that Windows version is just ‘different’. Looking through documentation they have the ‘WebKitPlugins’ property with this description:

So what the heck does that really mean?

Has anyone gotten video to successfully play in Windows webkit? Any tricks to success?[/quote]

Have been fighting with this for a long time https://forum.xojo.com/21866-audio-video-codecs-on-windows-webkit and finally gave up and used IE :frowning:

Dan, actually if you are OK with Windows 7 and IE 11 as minimum requirements, it seems you don’t need QuickTime, at least for h264 movies and mp3 files

In native mode, you can embed Windows Media Player :

[code]

[/code]

Oops, looks like windows 8.1 is required for IE 11:
http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/internet-explorer/ie-system-requirements#ie=ie-11

[quote=241456:@Michael Diehr]Oops, looks like windows 8.1 is required for IE 11:
http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/internet-explorer/ie-system-requirements#ie=ie-11[/quote]

http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/Internet-Explorer-11-for-Windows-7-details.aspx

Interesting, and in fact I just booted up a couple of Windows 7 machines and they do have IE11 installed, and I’m pretty sure I never manually loaded it. So it looks like some (all?) Windows 7 machines will have IE11 if they are fully updated.

Which Microsoft do we trust?

Hah, this is great. On the same page I linked, there is a popup menu and if you click it you will see

Confusing?

“Q: What do I need to run IE11?” “A: Windows 8.1”
"OK, but what If I want to run IE11 for Windows 7, what do I need then? “A: Windows 7”

[quote=241741:@Michael Diehr]“Q: What do I need to run IE11?” “A: Windows 8.1”
"OK, but what If I want to run IE11 for Windows 7, what do I need then? “A: Windows 7”[/quote]

Microsoft, where do you want to go today? :slight_smile: