Building with an alternative libffmpeg

[dcposch]

Since electron/electron#4530, Electron is using libffmpeg as a shared library (so/dylib/dll).

I'm trying to swap libffmpeg.so with one that supports a wider range of codecs, so that I can play back AC3 audio tracks from an Electron app.

Currently, the build process for this looks pretty involved

As far as I can tell, you have to modify four separate codebases:

• Custom build of electron. Electron downloads libchromiumcontent from S3. You can specify your own download URL and a custom LIBCHROMIUMCONTENT_COMMIT
• Custom build of libchromiumcontent. libchromiumcontent references the Chromium source tree at https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src.git, as defined in vendor/chromium/.gclient. I guess you could replace this with your own fork of Chromium.
• Custom build of chromium. Chromium references ffmpeg by once again referring to a git repo, which looks like it's cloned into third_party/ffmpeg. You can replace that with your own fork of ffmpeg.
• Custom build of ffmpeg Finally, in your own fork of ffmpeg, you could add a new ffmpeg_branding value. The built-in values are Chrome, Chromium, ChromeOS, and ChromiumOS. I tried adding a fifth one I called CompleteCommonCodecs, which adds support for AC3.

Questions

• Is there an easier way to do this, maybe using the patches folder here in libchromiumcontent?
• Is it possible to do this without modifying libchromiumcontent at all, just swapping in a custom libffmpeg.so into the finished Electron build?
• Has anyone else done this before?

[dcposch]

@zcbenz @felixrieseberg @RSATom any advice much appreciated!

[RSATom]

@dcposch, I can invite you to private slack room where you will find guys who did it already for well known torrent related project "which-name-better-not-call-in-public".

[RSATom]

@dcposch, could you send me your email? I'll send you invite. My email is rsatom@gmail.com.

[RSATom]

@feross, btw, I can invite you too, but don't sure if you'll like it. Guys there want get you there long time already...

[dcposch]

@RSATom, I found these patches, in case these are what you mean:

• https://github.com/kjthegod/ffmpeg/compare/b9d631d0ad277109678e86d729acc889793b4b94...master
• https://github.com/kjthegod/chromium/compare/b48a69e540a7b6ed6155acfa428cd06ee8f3cbd9...master

They're off of older versions of Chromium and FFmpeg than what we're using.

I can invite you to private slack room where you will find guys who did it already for well known torrent related project "which-name-better-not-call-in-public"

Haha, you don't have to censor the name, they're not Voldemort.

Their project encourages piracy so I'd rather not work with them. Thanks for the invite though.

[jaruba]

@RSATom I don't think there's even one person that is still working with Voldemort in there now.

[jaruba]

I'm also pretty sure that no one is using a re-built Electron 0.37+ with extended ffmpeg support. Only the Butter guys are using NW.js with extended ffmpeg support if i'm not mistaken, but none do it with Electron atm.

[RSATom]

@dcposch, I've talked more about Butter Project than Popcorn-Time - but it's your decision, and I respect it. So, if you would like get access to mentioned above room, just notify me, I will be glad get you there. Anyway, I respect your decision.

[zcbenz]

@dcposch To add support for more codecs in Electron, you basically need to do 2 things:

1. Add a patch in libchromiumcontent to make Chromium recognize more codes, and I will be good merging it to upstream;
2. Replace the ffmpeg library in Electron with your own one.

[tensor5]

Isn't it easier to use the system installed ffmpeg? I do it in my Electron package for Arch Linux by compiling Chromium with a patch from Gentoo. Then you can configure your system ffmpeg as you like.

[hadees]

@tensor5 if you just used the system installed ffmpeg would everything still play through the video tag?

@RSATom is butter going the route of using a modified libchromiumcontent? I really love your library webchimera but with the headache i've had with node and native libraries I'm starting to wish I could just recompile libchromiumcontent to support more codecs.

[tensor5]

@hadees the video tag works.

[hadees]

@tensor5 cool, and the video tag will work with any codex ffmpeg supports? That does seem a lot easier. I mean couldn't you just package up ffmpeg with electron then?

EDIT: Doh, that's pretty much what @zcbenz said on a second reading

[RSATom]

@hadees

@RSATom is butter going the route of using a modified libchromiumcontent ?

It depends... If you are able build ffmpeg yourself - then yes, it could give you benefits in some aspects. But most of Electron users just not skilled enough to do it.

[RSATom]

On other side <video> tag api is limited, that's why some prefer use WebChimera.js

[LukasBombach]

Hey, has there been any progress on this? I am too trying to get more / most! codecs work in the video tag and as you know this is pretty hard. I have a lot of questions

• Has anyone succeeded in compiling this and distributes it somewhere?
• Also @RSATom is your Slack still alive?
• How does it work using the system's ffmpeg to play videos in the <video> tag?
• And while I am here: Is there any decent documentation on how to compile ffmpeg / libchromiumcontent to make Electron support more videos?

[LukasBombach]

For reference, I asked the maintainers to provide a "full" ffmpeg alongside the "normal" distribution here electron/electron#9534

[RSATom]

Also @RSATom is your Slack still alive?

Don't know. Didn't use it long time. Better ask @luigiplr

[luigiplr]

Hey @RSATom long time no see ping, @LukasBombach it is alive yes.. however discussion regarding torrent'ing clients ended a while back. Would be happy to throw you a invite should you be interested.

A few have compiled nw.js successfully with full pretty good codec support, we ran into alot of perf problems decoding in the wild though (was a while back so i don't recall the specifics).

Have you investigated the usage of Web Chimera as an alternative?

[RSATom]

WebChimera is almost dead, don't think it's good idea use it.

[LukasBombach]

Yeah, I read that (that it's dying), very sad. In the WebChimera issues I found an alternative, but as I read in their issues, this library is also heavy on the CPU, so a "native" playback would still be much better.

[jchwei]

I found there are some work on building chromium from customized ffmpeg henrypp/chromium , so I extend it to libchromiumcontent.
The basic method is very similar to @dcposch's post, I'm working on it.

---- update -----
I have finished it, and enable full-codecs in electron just like the way in chromium.

[themihai]

@jchwei would you mind to send a PR to electron/libchromiumcontent ? It would be great to have a flag enabling whatever codecs we want from ffmpeg.

[smolleyes]

hello, after yearsssssssssssss of nwjs i still can t find a better way for this problem than live transcoding thru http pipe / ffmpeg (if canPlay fail) i still can read any video with not that much cpu (and in 2018 shitty pc have i5 so lol) i ll try to make a basic project with this one day :p, currently i can play

['aiff','ra','mka','webm','aac','wma','mp4','flac','wav','mpeg','opus','avi','flv','wmv','mkv','ogg','mov','ogv']; and hevc/x265... dts ac3 etc etc

[themihai]

@smolleyes did you manage to make the shuffling work as well ?(i.e. convert byte ranges used by the browser to time ranges used by ffmpeg)

[smolleyes]

hi, dammnnn just added the dxva2 support to my ffmpeg command line and it s huge improvement ! now my nwjs app play youtube 4k videos like a breeze :D

@themihai you mean seeking ?

[LukasBombach]

@jchwei is there a chance you can share your codec-enabled binaries?
@smolleyes Do you have a demo project we can learn from?

<3

[smolleyes]

hey @LukasBombach everything is in my github... streamstudio is my first project from years ago ... code is a real shit lol but still working, look at the js/ht5server.js (shame on me)... i started a small project from an electron / react boilerplate and i ll just add this system if possible (in clean es6)... when i ll have time

[themihai]

@smolleyes yeah I mean seeking.

[smolleyes]

@themihai i dont have any problems with seeking :), just use the -ss option of ffmpeg

[manast]

ok, so I would like to replace thelibffmpeg.so from electron with a custom one that is built for RPI with hw decoding enabled. I managed to build ffmpeg and also have an MPV player using it which plays videos super smooth in the RPI, however I am not able to build libffmpeg.so that I can use to replace the standard one, I just get a list of .so libraries like these:

libavcodec.so
libavdevice.so
libavfilter.so
libavformat.so
libavutil.so
libswresample.so
libswscale.so
libpostproc.so

For building ffmpeg I used this flags in configure:

./configure --prefix=/usr --enable-gpl --enable-nonfree --enable-shared --enable-libtheora --enable-libvorbis --enable-omx --enable-omx-rpi --enable-mmal --enable-libxcb --enable-libfreetype --enable-libass --enable-gnutls --disable-opencl --enable-libcdio --enable-libbluray --extra-cflags="-march=armv8-a+crc -mfpu=neon-fp-armv8 -mtune=cortex-a53" --enable-libx264 --enable-libfdk-aac --enable-libmp3lame --extra-cflags="-fPIC" --enable-pic --extra-ldflags="-Wl,-Bsymbolic"

Do you guys know how to create the desired libffmpeg.so?

[jchwei]

@LukasBombach Here is the windows x64 release .

[nornagon]

If you want to do this the same way Electron does, see the GN build docs. Instead of building the electron target, you can build the //third_party/ffmpeg target (with your changes applied to that directory). A bit heavyweight since you'll need to check out the whole chromium repository, but it'll definitely work.

See https://github.com/electron/electron/blob/77f73830e8fea5c5acbb745985732ceff5091fce/.circleci/config.yml#L284 for how we do this in CI.