Introducing gmerlin-mozilla

What's the best method to check if your multimedia architecture is really completely generic and reusable? One way is to write a firefox plugin for video playback and beat onto everything until it no longer crashes. The preliminary result is here:



And here are some things I think are worth noting:

How a plugin gets it's data
There are 2 methods:

• firefox handles the TCP connection and passes data via callbacks (NPP_WriteReady, NPP_Write). The gmerlin plugin API got a callback based read interface for this.
  
• the plugin opens the URL itself
  

The first method has the advantage, that procotols not supported by gmerlin but by firefox (e.g. https) will work. The disadvantage is, that passing the data from firefox to the input thread if the player will almost lockup the GUI because firefox spends most of it's time waiting until the player can accept more data. I found no way to prevent this in an elegant way. Thus, such streams are written to a temporary file and read by the input thread. Local files are recognized as such and opened by the plugin.

Emulating other plugins
Commercial plugins (like Realplayer or Quicktime) have lots of gimmicks. One of these lets you embed multiple instances of the plugin, where one will show up as the video window, another one as the volume slider etc. Gmerlin-mozilla handles these pragmatically: The video window always has a toolbar (which can hide after the mouse was idle), so additional control widgets are not initialized at all. They will appear as grey boxes.

Of course not all oddities are handled correctly yet, but the infrastructure for doing this is there.

Scriptability
Another gimmick is to control the plugin from a JavaScript GUI. While the older scripting API (XPCOM) was kind of bloated and forced the programmer into C++, the new method (npruntime) is practically as versatile, but much easier to support (even in plain C). Basically, the plugin exports an object, (an NPObject) which has (among others) functions for querying the supported methods and properties. Other functions exist for invoking methods, or setting and getting properties. Of course not all scripting commands are supported yet.

GUI
A GUI for a web-plugin must look sexy, that's clear. Gmerlin-mozilla has a GUI similar to the GUI player (which might look completely unsexy for some). But in contrast to other free web-plugins it's skinnable, so there is at least a chance to change this.

Some GUI widgets had to be updated and fixed before they could be used in the plugin. Most importantly, timeouts (like for the scrolltext) have to be removed from the event-loop before the plugin is destroyed, otherwise a crash happens after.

The fine thing is, that firefox also uses gtk-2 for it's GUI, so having Gtk-widgets works perfectly. If the browser isn't gtk-2 based, the plugin won't load.

Embedding technique
Gmerlin-mozilla needs XEmbed. Some people hate XEmbed, but I think it's pretty well designed as long as you don't expect too much from it. The Gmerlin X11 display plugin already supports XEmbed because it always opens it's own X11 connection. After I fixed some things, it embeds nicely into firefox.

Configuration
The GUI should not be bloated by exotic buttons, which are rarely used. Therefore most of the configuration options are available via the right-click menu. Here, you can also select fullscreen mode.