At the Web Engines Hackfest in A Coruña at the beginning of October 2017, I was working on adding some proof-of-concept code to Servo to render HTML5 videos with GStreamer. For the impatient, the results can be seen in this video here

And the code can be found here and here.

Details

Servo is Mozilla‘s experimental browser engine written in Rust, optimized for high-performance, parallelized rendering. Some of the parts of Servo are being merged in Firefox as part of the Project Quantum, and already provide a lot of performance and stability improvements there.

During the hackfest I actually spent most of the time trying to wrap my head around the huge Servo codebase. It seems very well-structured and designed, exactly what you would expect from starting such a project from scratch by a company that has decades of experience writing browser engines already. After also having worked on WebKit in the past, I would say that you can see the difference of a legacy codebase from the end of the 90s and something written in a modern language with modern software engineering practices.

To the actual implementation of HTML5 video rendering via GStreamer, I actually started on top of the initial implementation that Philippe Normand started before already. That one was rendering the video in a separate window though, and did not work with the latest version of Servo anymore. I cleaned it up and made it work again (probably the best task you can do to learn a new codebase), and then added support for actually rendering the video inside the web view.

This required quite a few additions on the Servo side, some of which are probably more hacks than anything else, but from the GStreamer-side is was extremely simple. In Servo currently all the infrastructure for media rendering is still missing, while GStreamer has more than a decade of polishing for making integration into other software as easy as possible.

All the GStreamer code was written with the GStreamer Rust bindings, containing not a single line of unsafe code.

As you can see from the above video, the results work quite well already. Media controls or anything more fancy are not working though. Also rendering is currently done completely in software, and a RGBA frame is then uploaded via OpenGL to the GPU for rendering. However, hardware codecs can already be used just fine, and basically every media format out there is supported.

Future

While this all might sound great, unfortunately Mozilla’s plans for media support in Servo are different. They’re planning to use the C++ Firefox/Gecko media backend instead of GStreamer. Best to ask them for reasons, I would probably not repeat them correctly.

Nonetheless, I’ll try to keep the changes updated with latest Servo and once they add more things for media support themselves add the corresponding GStreamer implementations in my branch. It still provides value for both showing that GStreamer is very well capable of handling web use cases (which it already showed in WebKit), as well as being a possibly better choice for people trying to use Servo on embedded systems or with hardware codecs in general. But as I’ll have to work based on what they do, I’m not going to add anything fundamentally new myself at this point as I would have to rewrite it around whatever they decide for the implementation of it anyway.

Also once that part is there, having GStreamer directly render to an OpenGL texture would be added, which would allow direct rendering with hardware codecs to the screen without having the CPU worry about all the raw video data.

But for now, it’s waiting until they catch up with the Firefox/Gecko media backend.