Re: Introducing emacs-webkit and more thoughts on Emacs rendering (was Rethinking the design of xwidgets)

[Arthur Miller]

Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca> writes:

>> To my knowledge, mpv is probably the neetiest one to bring in media
>> playing capabilities; it has lots of codecs, is written to be embedded,
>> is free and would make Emacs be able to play music and video files
>> without external players. Adding multimedia capabilities opens up for
>> lots of flexibility and creativity; people can maybe do interesting
>> stuff with it. I would certainly like Emacs to become a multimedia
>> player,
>
> The question is what benefit is there to having it linked in as
> a library as opposed to accessing similar functionality via
> a sub-process.
One could programmatically render stuff on top of the video; embedd it
in a viewer to create a player, like there is image slide for image
mode, video tag for shr was what triggered discussion. I mean you could
code a renderer for video just as you made svg renderer; but somebody
already created a re-usable, well tested library, so why recreate what
is already done and tested. That is how I think of it.

>> I play my music with Emacs already :-).
>
> This would tend to argue in favor of not having it as a library since
> you can already do what you want just fine using a sub-process.
Yeah, I know; but just playing music is a little bit of playing with a
closed box. And it does not work with video. Also as I said it is a bit
about efficiency. I think it would be useful for Emacs to play sound
files and video files natively.

For me Emacs is long past just text editor; for me it is more like an
über-terminal or we could call it OS-browser ... I don't know. Just how
I use it, I understand if others use Emacs differently.