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

[Arthur Miller]

Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org> writes:

> [[[ To any NSA and FBI agents reading my email: please consider    ]]]
> [[[ whether defending the US Constitution against all enemies,     ]]]
> [[[ foreign or domestic, requires you to follow Snowden's example. ]]]

> Would people please present a description of what this plan aims to
> do?
Yes of of course! Unfortunately; I am affraid there isn't much of a
plan.

> Or perhaps it doesn't do anything like that.  But I can't assume that,
> since I just don't know.  Would you please fill me in?

libmpv is just a library to play media files, has nothing to do with
javascript. You can check yourself:

 mpv is a free (as in freedom) media player for the command line. It
 supports a wide variety of media file formats, audio and video codecs,
 and subtitle types.

https://mpv.io/

Included codecs are Free too. I think most of codecs come from ffmpeg
which comes parts licensed in lgpl 2.1 and parts in gpl 2 license:
https://ffmpeg.org/legal.html

And list of included codecs:
https://ffmpeg.org/general.html#Supported-File-Formats_002c-Codecs-or-Features

MPV also comes in form of a shared .so with C interface, which (I think)
is well suited to interface with from Emacs. I hoped it could be
embedded into Emacs, similar to libjpeg or libpng to make Emacs display
video in a buffer in same way as it is displaying images. I was actually
looking at it myself like a two, three years or more ago, but I couldn't
figure out image.c. Now when Lars brought up shr.el and <video> tag, I
thought he can maybe bring it into Emacs for the use in shr.el, since he
is probably (much) more introduced into image.c if-defs and Emacs
internals in general then I will probably every be in soon future to
come. At least I think he is. I am using mpv as my video player normally
but I would prefer it to be embedded in Emacs framem. That was the
*master* plan :-). 

> For instance, I am concerned that it may lead to extending Emacs using
> Javascript programs without verification of their licenses, perhaps
> picking them up off the internet without checking them.
I am not sure, but I wouldn't think that playing sound and video in
Emacs would lead to more Javascript than other media formats like images
or html processing in general. By the way, how do you verify if JS is
free or not? Do you have an Emacs script that can download it and check
the license? That could be an useful part of Emacs maybe? Or maybe it
already is, I am horrible at looking what there is, I just hack what I
need when I need it, I am not so much for smörgåsbord in general.

> There may be ethical questions that need to be considered,
> as well as
> technical design questions.
Yes, I understand your concerns, but as above; I don't think there
should be more concerns about libmpv then what it is with libjpeg,
libpng, libtiff and similar. But I am not an expert in legal issues; am
actually very bad at those, so correct me if I am wrong.

Btw; I also own you an unanswered mail since few weeks ago; I am sorry,
I wanted to formulate more than just a hasty answer, but then I never
got back to it.