Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about how can I make nice and easily customizable interfaces for video applications. My idea of ‘nice’ is kind of orthogonal to what most of my expected user base will want, and by ‘easily customizable’ I don’t mean ‘go edit this glade file / json stage / etc’.

Clutter and MX are great to make good looking interfaces and like Gtk have something that resembles css to style stuff and can load an ui from an xml or json file. However, they will need sooner or later a mix developer and a designer. And unless you do something up front, the interface is tied to the backend process that does the heavy video work.

So, seeing all the good stuff we are doing with Caspa, the VideoEditor, WebVfx and our new magical synchronization framework I questioned:

Why instead of using Gtk, can’t I make my ui with html and all the fancy things that are already made?

And while we are at it I want process isolation, so if the ui crashes (or I want to launch more than one to see side by side different ui styles) the video processing does not stop. Of course, should I want more tightly coupling I can embed WebKit on my application and make a javascript bridge to avoid having to use something like websockets to interact.

One can always dream…

Then my muse appeared and commanded me to type. Thankfully, mine is not like the poor soul on “Blank Page” had.

So I type, and I type, and I type.

‘Till I made this: two GStreamer pipelines, outputting to auto audio and video sinks and also to a webkit process. Buffers travel thru shared memory, still they are copied more than I’d like to but that makes things a bit easier and helps decoupling the processes, so if one stalls the others don’t care (and anyway for most of the things I want to do I’ll need to make a few copies). Lucky me I can throw beefier hardware and play with more interesting things.

I expect to release this in a couple of weeks when it’s more stable and usable, as of today it tends to crash if you stare at it a bit harder.

“It’s an act of faith, baby”

Using WebKit to display video from a GStreamer application.
Something free to whoever knows who the singer is without using image search.