Base-Art - Philippe Normand

From WebKit/GStreamer to rust-av, a journey on our stack’s layers

Philippe Normand — Tue, 16 Apr 2024 22:15:00 +0200

In this post I’ll try to document the journey starting from a WebKit issue and ending up improving third-party projects that WebKitGTK and WPEWebKit depend on.

I’ve been working on WebKit’s GStreamer backends for a while. Usually some new feature needed on WebKit side would trigger work …

GNOME Web Canary is back

Philippe Normand — Sat, 08 Jul 2023 10:00:00 +0200

This is a short PSA post announcing the return of the GNOME Web Canary builds. Read on for the crunchy details.

A couple years ago I was blogging about the GNOME Web Canary flavor. In summary this special build of GNOME Web provides a preview of the upcoming version of …

WebRTC in WebKitGTK and WPE, status updates, part I

Philippe Normand — Thu, 16 Feb 2023 21:30:00 +0100

Some time ago we at Igalia embarked on the journey to ship a GStreamer-powered WebRTC backend. This is a long journey, it is not over, but we made some progress …

Introducing the GNOME Web Canary flavor

Philippe Normand — Mon, 02 Aug 2021 14:00:00 +0200

Today I am happy to unveil GNOME Web Canary which aims to provide bleeding edge, most likely very unstable builds of Epiphany, depending on daily builds of the WebKitGTK development version. Read on to know more about this.

Until recently the GNOME Web browser was available for end-users in two …

Catching up on WebKit GStreamer WebAudio backends maintenance

Philippe Normand — Sun, 29 Nov 2020 13:45:00 +0100

Over the past few months the WebKit development team has been working on modernizing support for the WebAudio specification. This post highlights some of the changes that were recently merged, focusing on the GStreamer ports.

My fellow WebKit colleague, Chris Dumez, has been very active lately, updating the WebAudio implementation …

Web-augmented graphics overlay broadcasting with WPE and GStreamer

Philippe Normand — Thu, 02 Jul 2020 15:00:00 +0200

Graphics overlays are everywhere nowadays in the live video broadcasting industry. In this post I introduce a new demo relying on GStreamer and WPEWebKit to deliver low-latency web-augmented video broadcasts.

Readers of this blog might remember a few posts about WPEWebKit and a GStreamer element we at Igalia worked on …

Setting up Debian containers on Fedora Silverblue

Philippe Normand — Sat, 13 Jun 2020 13:50:00 +0200

After almost 20 years using Debian, I am trying something different, Fedora Silverblue. However for work I still need to use Debian/Ubuntu from time to time. In this post I am explaining the steps to setup Debian containers on Silverblue.

By default Silverblue comes with Toolbox which perfectly integrates …

Web Engines Hackfest 2014

Philippe Normand — Sat, 13 Jun 2020 12:05:12 +0200

Last week I attended the Web Engines Hackfest. The event was sponsored by Igalia (also hosting the event), Adobe and Collabora.

As usual I spent most of the time working on the WebKitGTK+ GStreamer backend and Sebastian Dröge kindly joined and helped out quite a bit, make sure to read …

Moving to Pelican

Philippe Normand — Sat, 13 Jun 2020 12:05:12 +0200

Time for a change! Almost 10 years ago I was starting to hack on a Blog engine with two friends, it was called Alinea and it powered this website for a long time. Back then hacking on your own Blog engine was the pre-requirement to host your blog :) But nowadays …

GStreamer’s playbin3 overview for application developers

Philippe Normand — Sat, 13 Jun 2020 12:05:12 +0200

Multimedia applications based on GStreamer usually handle playback with the playbin element. I recently added support for playbin3 in WebKit. This post aims to document the changes needed on application side to support this new generation flavour of playbin.

So, first of, why is it named playbin3 anyway? The GStreamer …

The GNOME-Shell Gajim extension maintenance

Philippe Normand — Sat, 13 Jun 2020 12:05:12 +0200

Back in January 2011 I wrote a GNOME-Shell extension allowing Gajim users to carry on with their chats using the Empathy infrastructure and UI present in the Shell. For some time the extension was also part of the official gnome-shell-extensions module and then I had to move it to …

WebKitGTK and WPE now supporting videos in the img tag

Philippe Normand — Tue, 09 Jun 2020 18:00:00 +0200

Using videos in the <img> HTML tag can lead to more responsive web-page loads in most cases. Colin Bendell blogged about this topic, make sure to read his post on the cloudinary website. As it turns out, this feature has been supported for more than 2 years in Safari, but …

Introducing the WebKit Flatpak SDK

Philippe Normand — Mon, 08 Jun 2020 18:50:00 +0200

Working on a web-engine often requires a complex build infrastructure. This post documents our transition from JHBuild to Flatpak for the WebKitGTK and WPEWebKit development builds.

For the last 10 years, WebKitGTK has been relying on a custom JHBuild moduleset to handle its dependencies and (try to) ensure a reproducible …

HTML overlays with GstWPE, the demo

Philippe Normand — Sun, 08 Dec 2019 15:00:00 +0100

Once again this year I attended the GStreamer conference and just before that, Embedded Linux conference Europe which took place in Lyon (France). Both events were a good opportunity to demo one of the use-cases I have in mind for GstWPE, HTML overlays!

As we, at Igalia, usually have a …

Review of the Igalia Multimedia team Activities (2019/H1)

Philippe Normand — Mon, 05 Aug 2019 15:30:00 +0200

This blog post takes a look back at the various Multimedia-related tasks the Igalia Multimedia team was involved in during the first half of 2019.

GStreamer Editing Services

Thibault added support for the OpenTimelineIO open format for editorial timeline information. Having many editorial timeline information formats supported by OpenTimelineIO reduces …