A Mutable Log

A blog by Devendra Tewari

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Project maintained by tewarid Hosted on GitHub Pages — Theme by mattgraham

WebKit/GTK+ on Ubuntu

Ubuntu has fairly good independent browsers - FireFox and Chromium come to mind. If you want a cutting-edge WebKit port that is deeply integrated with the Ubuntu Desktop, WebKit/Gtk+ is worth taking a look at. Its UI is based on Gtk and the multimedia playback is based on GStreamer.

Obtain source code

Source can be downloaded from webkitgtk.org. There are archives of the stable and development trees there.

Build

You’ll need to install the following packages (for the development tree at version 1.5.1) and any dependencies. Other packages may need to be installed for newer versions if ./configure fails.

• bison
• flex
• gperf
• libjpeg8-dev
• libicu-dev
• libgail-dev
• libxt-dev
• libsoup2.4-dev
• libsqlite3-dev
• libxslt1-dev

Then, run the following commands

tar xvzf webkit-1.5.1.tar.gz
cd webkit-1.5.1
./configure
make

Test

Run the browser using a simple helper program

./Programs/GtkLauncher

Open http://www.youtube.com/html5. Opt in to the html5 trial. Watch any video. WebM videos should play nicely on Ubuntu 11.04.

Play video without start up lag

I am experimenting with HTTP streaming for real time communication (RTC). For that to work with no lag, I need the video tag to start playing the video immediately. I commented all lines of code that instructs the pipeline to enter the state GST_STATE_PAUSED in file ./Source/WebCore/platform/graphics/gstreamer/MediaPlayerPrivateGStreamer.cpp.

For instance, this line in method MediaPlayerPrivateGStreamer::pause()

    if (changePipelineState(GST_STATE_PAUSED))
        LOG_VERBOSE(Media, "Pause");

Run GtkLauncher in fullscreen

To run GtkLauncher in fullscreen with no address and status bars, edit the source file ./Tools/GtkLauncher/main.c.

In function createWindow, comment out the two lines shown within comments below

    /*gtk_box_pack_start(GTK_BOX(vbox), createToolbar(uriEntry, webView), FALSE, FALSE, 0);*/
    gtk_box_pack_start(GTK_BOX(vbox), createBrowser(window, uriEntry, statusbar, webView), TRUE, TRUE, 0);
    /*gtk_box_pack_start(GTK_BOX(vbox), statusbar, FALSE, FALSE, 0);*/

Then, in function main, add the following line before the call to gtk_main

    gtk_window_fullscreen((GtkWindow*)main_window);