Syphon into web browser?

[Udart]

I am wondering, would it be possible to somehow create a Syphon client inside a web browser context? So that you would be able to access a Syphon source in an HTML element and accessible with javascript in the code of your web page.

To clarify I am not talking about screen capture such as Syphoner that would capture the screen of a web browser into Syphon (as per the previous thread ‘Chrome into Syphon’). I am talking about the opposite end of the food chain – getting a Syphon image into a web browser window.

Of course this would be of limited use in regular web applications but I find that html5/wegl could be very useful for some purposes such as VJing or digital art installations – I find the HTML5/webgl technologies very powerful and approachable even for applications that just run on the local machine.

I am just asking your general opinion on how one would approach this. Could a custom built app using WebKit be able to do this? Mind you there has to be some way to access the Syphon image with the HTML/javascript interface of the browser.

Or would a plugin for a browser (be it Safari or chrome or other) be the right way? i have seen cool plugins such as Jazz-midi (http://jazz-soft.net) that proves to me that a general concept it is possible to write browser plugins as a bridge from javascript to data on the user system that would otherwise not be available inside the browser.
Of course in order to leverage the full performance of Syphon one would like to avoid moving image data of the GPU – regardless of what method is chosen.

Does anybody have any thoughts on which method is possible – plugin? modified browser? something else?

[Udart]

I’ll rephrase my question to a very short and more concise version:

What applications/plugins would be required one wishes to make a syphon source available as a texture to a WebGL rendering context in a browser.

A custom plugin? A modified web browser application?

[vade]

Ideally you’d have support native in the browser. At one point, a friend at Google mentioned they might put Syphon support right in to Chrome. I can ping them and see if its feasible at all, and point them to this thread.

I suspect it would never get to be in an official version, but perhaps an alternative build of Chrome could have Syphon support.

This is *not* an indication that anyone is working, will work, or ever will make such a thing, just that it was mentioned to me as a possibility. In other words, no promises now or ever 🙂

[Udart]

Yea I am not getting my hopes up but it would be worth a try I guesss. Syphon support in a standard unmodified web browser is surely never going to happen due to the obvious security concerns.
But a custom build would do the job fine for people experimenting on the local machine making prototypes, art, games or whatever.

[Udart]

I am wondering if the way to go is to try and get Syphon into webRTC?
After all Syphon can readily be used for screen ‘capture’ for video conferencing purposes.

[Udart]

I am talking a lot to myself here…
Anyways it seems a screen capture feature is already built into the next version of Chrome (v26 Canary). It does seem horribly slow on the local machine probably because it’s intended for streaming and the screen image you see has already been compressed as a video.

But it seems if Syphon was ever implemented it would be here in this API. It also is contrary to what I thought about screen capture being too much of a security risk.

Demo:
https://html5-demos.appspot.com/static/getusermedia/screenshare.html

(you need Google Chrome v26 and you need to set the flag –enable-usermedia-screen-capturing)

[GoogolHz]

I realize this is an old thread, but camtwist should do the trick of flowing syphon into a web browser as a virtual webcam. Then using getUserMedia can be used to getthe webcam frames into canvas. Here is a link on how to do that: http://html5hub.com/using-the-getusermedia-api-with-the-html5-video-and-canvas-elements/

[edwin]

@Vade I saw you had a chromium project started. Do you have a built app somewhere? I have no idea how to build chromium on a mac 🙁

[vade]

https://www.dropbox.com/s/ijr45qdl7oz5mj7/Chromium.zip?dl=0

and there has been some recent movement on that repo too.

[edwin]

great! thanks, will try this out 🙂

[ffd8]

Aha – super cool, thanks! That Chromium build works perfect (minus a crash if server is quit first). 

p5.js + openemu syphon = fun potential. Having Chromium broadcast the current tab as a Syphon Server would be a dream for circular feedback or recording visuals with better framerate than screen-recording.. but I saw the github note that it wouldn’t be easy.

[Author]

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