So, after Simon snitched on me and leaked highly sensitive information about my top-secret project, I guess it’s finally time to spill the beans.
Yes, it is true. For the past few months I have been semi-secretly working on taking over the world implementing support for the HTML5 video and audio elements in the Qt port of WebKit, using Phonon as the media backend. This adds QtWebKit to the list of cool browsers that support this feature.
The introduction of a special purpose media element in the HTML5 draft allows embedding of audio and video content into web pages without resorting to using the generic object tag with some random plugin-based player. It’s as easy as this:
The media element also comes with a scripting API, making it easy to roll your own player interface if you want to (or use the default one provided by the user agent by adding the controls attribute).
Employing Phonon to implement the playback started out as my “hey-welcome-to-Trolltech-here-is-a-fun-task-for-you”-project, but turned out to also be a good test-case for the implementation of the various Phonon backends we are doing here at Trolltech. The project was momentarily put on ice while we were busy stabilizing the 4.4 release, but now that 4.4 is out the door it’s time to get back in the saddle.
Some of the tasks currently in the pipeline are Win and Mac support (which is still largely untested), full screen support using overlays (for speed), routing the data through an IODevice rather than just passing a URL (which will help buffering and let us ensure that per-site credentials will work), plus implementing more of the default UI controls.
Initial support is already in WebKit trunk for those of you who want to try it out, and the finished result will be in Qt 4.5. Here’s a screenshot, for you pixel peepers out there:
