Web browser / engine in Kodi
#1
I would like to propose a web engine / webbrowser as a alternative idee.
Most of the content providers have a standaard HTML 5 web-interface for TV for their service.
If Kodi would gain the option to easily convert these HTML 5 web interface to a Kodi app, Kodi would gain allot of new media sources.
Media in the web app could then be played via the new video player and DRM functionality.
I know that a native Kodi app would be a better fit but in practice the native apps by the community breaks quite often or is not provided by the community at all.
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#2
Something like:

https://cobalt.foo

Would be interesting.
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#3
there already is a working proof of concept by  @alwinus for a webbrowser add-on based on Chromium (IIRC). A student could probably pick up this work, finish it and make some kind of "web view" available to other add-ons
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#4
(2018-02-13, 09:54)da-anda Wrote: there already is a working proof of concept by  @alwinus for a webbrowser add-on based on Chromium (IIRC). A student could probably pick up this work, finish it and make some kind of "web view" available to other add-ons
Yes source code can be found here => https://github.com/kodi-web

alwinus also posted a blog post with outline here => http://esmasol.de/open-source/kodi-add-o...b-browser/
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#5
For more information visit https://forum.kodi.tv/showthread.php?tid=310054 and https://forum.kodi.tv/showthread.php?tid=231545.

The most recent publicly available sources seems to be https://github.com/AlwinEsch/web.browser.chromium/ and https://github.com/AlwinEsch/kodi/tree/i...er-cleanup.

And yes, this is a great project! Wink
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#6
CEF is much more heavyweight than Cobalt, which is why I suggested it.
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#7
(2018-02-19, 04:45)keith Wrote: CEF is much more heavyweight than Cobalt, which is why I suggested it.
FYI, CEF is a full HTML5 engine to all W3C technologies specification standards, while Cobalt only implements a subset of HTML5/CSS/JS to be able to run some applications. CEF whole purpose is to hell embedding of Chromium-based browsers in other C and C++ applications, like Kodi.

https://bitbucket.org/chromiumembedded/cef

If you manage to make the CEF engine into a binary addon for Kodi then I suspect that its slightly larger footprint will not be an issue when compared to the additional benefits that you would gain out-of-the-box with a full HTML5 engine lika CEF. Especially not if one of the goals will be to run Netflix own native HTML5 app without modification in Kodi.

CEF is a mature project compared to Cobalt and my guess is also that CEF is documented and still better maintained so probably the best framework for a proof-of-concept in Kodi?
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