Previous topicNext topic

HTML CANVAS via awesomium

Suggestions for new features for Magic.
Post Reply
visuality
Posts: 116
Joined: Sat Dec 20, 2014 9:04 pm

HTML CANVAS via awesomium

Post by visuality »

Just to be a little helpful if you have loaded a Gif with the image module and it doesn't play back, that is because Gif's to Magic are viewed as movie files, import the Gif into the video module and wella, video playback. Ok now onto my suggestion.

Just thought the web being the huge monster of visual resources, culture, news, pretty much life as we know it on the grid, would be a really nice resource to have in a window that we could mix and manipulate. The problem is developing the underlying web engine or tapping into existing ones. Done already :)

There is a framework(?) that is supposed to be easy as cake to integrate called "http://www.awesomium.com/", when used in applications it generates web content the in GL it has something to do with the window mode it uses, the content is mixable and spout-able :) I also found this alternative http://sourceforge.net/projects/glmixer/ app that has said feature implemented but unfortunately its buggy as hell, I think he tried to code his own solution, nice try though. I have max msp jitter, but you can not visual mix the display of the web object. It is just for Kiosk or something, You can copy it internally by using some other other jitter object but you can imagine how that would slow things down especially with Max.

Sorry my writings so sloppy, hope all is well.
Magic
Site Admin
Posts: 3440
Joined: Wed Apr 09, 2014 9:28 pm

Re: HTML CANVAS via awesomium

Post by Magic »

Thanks, I've definitely thought about some kind of web browser integration. The only problem with Awesomium is that it doesn't handle mouse/keyboard input by itself, so the host application has to handle it. And neither Magic nor the Awesomium Spout app (see http://spout.zeal.co/forums/topic/spout ... a-browser/) can currently do that. It may sound simple, but having a web page respond to input is actually a rather complicated affair.

A very simple way to display the output of a web browser or any other app inside Magic is to use a program like ManyCam (https://download.manycam.com/). It has the ability to capture your desktop as a "virtual" capture device. In Magic all you have to do is use the VidCap module and select ManyCam as the source, and voila, you can see your desktop in Magic. This would solve the problem of interactivity, since you'd be providing input to the web browser directly, as normal.

Or, another upcoming solution will be to use the new VideoStream module which will be released with Magic v1.65. It will receive any kind of streaming video, as long as it's publicly available or at least accessible on your local network. So, you could easily set up a streaming server on a separate computer (using VLC for example), and stream the desktop to Magic.

Hopefully one of those two solutions would be a useful workaround for now. Or, if you don't need to provide input to the web page but just want to display it, the Spout app would be the way to go (in combination with Magic's SpoutReceiver module).
Post Reply