im in ur javascript, decoding ur webm

Been a while since I posted; working on various bits and bobs.

Most exciting at the moment: initial work on pure-JavaScript WebM playback support for ogv.js (soon to become codec.js!)

This is currently very incomplete; video doesn’t come out right and audio’s not hooked up yet, and most notably you only get a few frames before it craps out. :)

Update: Got audio working after some sleep, and playback is more thorough. Yay! Still no seeking yet, and playback may not always reach completion.

I’ve seen a couple other attempts to build WebM decoders in JS using emscripten (eg Route9), but nobody’s gotten them hooked up to a full-blown player with audio yet. With a little more work on the decoder side, I should be able to leverage all of my investment in ogv.js’s player logic.

webm-in-progresslive preview of current experimental build

How’s it work?

I’m using nestegg for the WebM container parsing; currently this is giving me some impedence mismatch with the first-generation ogv.js code due to different i/o models.

ogv.js’s C-side Ogg container parsing was set up with entirely asynchronous i/o due to the needs of using async XHR to fetch data over the network. Nestegg, however, uses synchronous i/o callbacks in some places, and I really don’t want to jump through all the hoops to do WebM cue seeking without using the library. (Already did that with Ogg and it was horrid!)

I may be able to adapt the ogv.js C-side code to using synchronous i/o callbacks and let them get mapped to async i/o on the JS side, thanks to some fancy features in emscripten — either Asyncify or the newer emterpreter mode for parts of the high-level code while keeping the low-level decoder in pure asm.js. Need to do a little more research… :)

Possibilities

Performance: speed on WebM/VP8 decoding won’t be as good as the Ogg/Theora decoder for now so may not be suitable for mobile devices, but should work fine on many laptop/desktop machines.

VP9: untested so far, but should work… though again, likely to be still slower than VP8.

Threading: currently threading is disabled in the build. There’s work ongoing at Mozilla to support pthreads for emscripten programs, using a new SharedArrayBuffer interface to share memory between Web Worker threads. Might experiment with that later as libvpx has some threading options (may only be useful for VP9 multi-slice decoding for now) but it’ll be a while before most browsers support it. However this might be a good use case for asking Microsoft and Apple to add support. :)

SIMD: there’s also ongoing work on SIMD instruction abstraction in JavaScript, with Mozilla and Microsoft partnering. Will have to test with autovectorization in the compiler enabled and see if it makes any difference to decode speed, but don’t know how complete the support in Firefox and Edge is etc.