Kweb Suite (Minimal Kiosk Browser, omxplayerGUI)

[roblan]

Does kweb supporst css filters? I can't get them working... Is there any option I need to enable?
I'm using kweb3

Yes, the engine supports filters. You have to use the webkit version of CSS filters.

kweb supports them, but kweb3 doesn't... or do I need to set F flag forkweb3 as well?

But you should consider not using it. This is exactly the kind of stuff that makes the Internet a pain to use from small computers. If you need a sepia version (or apply any other effects), create it in GIMP or Photoshop and put a static image on your server.

I have little or no controll over image - it's a coverart from song metadata... It's not public website, just local "what's now playing" interface.

And what about mix-blend-mode support?
What WebKit version is kweb anyway?

[gkreidl]

[
kweb supports them, but kweb3 doesn't... or do I need to set F flag for kweb3 as well?

And what about mix-blend-mode support?
What WebKit version is kweb anyway?

Your are right. kweb3 doesn't support it. Epiphany doesn't support it either. So it's an engine problem.
Option "F" is not required.

kweb uses the default Jessie webkitgtk 2.4.9 version (from raspbian.org)
kweb3 uses webkitgtk3 2.4.1 engine from raspberrypi.org archive (same as epiphany).

[fantasticflembo128]

Hi,
I've been using kweb3 for my digital signage project which runs from an IIS Server on site. It has multiple different pages and moves between them all itself, etc, but when I have a video on a page I have issues. I'm just using a HTML5 video tag, pointed at a video file on the server. It runs fine for hours, switching between pages and that. But then after a couple of hours it will freeze. Doesn't do this on non-video pages, so I presume it's the HTML5 video. Is there something I am doing wrong, or is this a common issue? I know the manual does say about using kweb3 can cause crashes. Is there any error logs I can check to see why it is doing this?
Thanks.

[gkreidl]

Hi,
I've been using kweb3 for my digital signage project which runs from an IIS Server on site. It has multiple different pages and moves between them all itself, etc, but when I have a video on a page I have issues. I'm just using a HTML5 video tag, pointed at a video file on the server. It runs fine for hours, switching between pages and that. But then after a couple of hours it will freeze. Doesn't do this on non-video pages, so I presume it's the HTML5 video. Is there something I am doing wrong, or is this a common issue? I know the manual does say about using kweb3 can cause crashes. Is there any error logs I can check to see why it is doing this?
Thanks.

I've run a number of extensive tests (and also some of my beta testers) during the last weeks of the new 1.7 version. I've discovered some serious bugs in the video player of the webkit3 engine. I suppose that the problems are caused by bugs in the gstreamer-1.0 libraries which are used for video and audio decoding (I know about definite bugs from my transcoding project which also uses gstreamer-1.0). I think that there are some memory leaks (which I have observed before) which lead to memory corruption after a while.
It definitely depends on the size of the video area. If I disable omxplayer and play video streams directly inside the browser (the built-in video player, not embedded HTML5 video) the corruption starts earlier with larger video sizes (screen areas).
I will send some of my observations to the collabora developers, but I'm not sure if they are still working on it (and get paid by the Foundation). There hasn't been any update for a long time. And one gstreamer bug I reported is awaiting a fix for months. Another one got fixed after I proposed the fix myself.
I cannot do anything about it but report bugs and wait for bug fixes-

I don't know how you control your digital signage application. Perhaps we can find a workaround. Send me a PM with your email address.

[Gammon]

I tried doing a kweb install on a fresh copy of Raspbian Jessie and I received the following errors shortly after it started:

[email protected]:~/kweb-1.6.9 $ ./debinstall
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
Error opening the cache:
E:The package libdvdcss needs to be reinstalled, but I can't find an archive for it.
cp: cannot stat ‘/usr/local/share/kweb/ktop’: No such file or directory
sudo: kwebhelper_set.py: command not found
./debinstall: 9: ./debinstall: preparekweb: not found
[email protected]:~/kweb-1.6.9 $

I tried update which loaded a few things but didn't fix the problem. I tried upgrade which failed with the same error message. Any ideas why this is happening or where I can find this package to install? I searched around on Google and couldn't really find anything specific to RaspberryPi.

Thanks

[gkreidl]

kweb does not depend on libdvdcsss. The installing process is not finished. All following error message are resulting from that.

I assume you have a corrupted file system.

Did you install a plain Raspbian image or NOOBS? Did you expand the file system?
I've seen similar reports here recently; I would try a new Raspbian installation (on a new SD card, different brand, perhaps).
Then expand the the file system, update and upgrade, and try again.

[ToSa]

I'm trying to get kweb running to display a dashing.io page in kiosk mode. dashing.io uses server sent events (SSE) which is causing it to fail e.g. in Internet Explorer but all webkit browsers I tried so far worked fine. With kweb though I can't get it to work. As soon as I remove the creation of the EventSource in JS, the page loads fine. Is this a known limitation? Any chance to get it fixed?

Edit: nevermind - the server took longer than expected to restart so this was not at all an issue with kweb. SSE working fine...

[Gammon]

kweb does not depend on libdvdcsss. The installing process is not finished. All following error message are resulting from that.

I assume you have a corrupted file system.

Did you install a plain Raspbian image or NOOBS? Did you expand the file system?
I've seen similar reports here recently; I would try a new Raspbian installation (on a new SD card, different brand, perhaps).
Then expand the the file system, update and upgrade, and try again.

I'm thinking the SD cards that I have are probably the issue. I was able to finally get it installed but received Bus Errors on 2 different cards (Kingston 16GB SDCA10/16GB N0575-002-AD1LF). Any recommendation for a good stable SD card?

[pontypool]

I am having problems running certain videos. I don't know why it plays some find and not others. The codec on the offending videos seems to be div3 ... There are no audio problems, but either omx player immediately closes when I try to run this video or vlc plays it but the video is mostly frozen hmmm
omx player also crashes during playback of video files that it does manage to play.
Maybe I need a codec pack ???? : /
am downloading the videos via deluge torrent.
I am even considering it has something to do with this, because I haven't yet seen a problem with playing videos via usb pen drive from another computer, although that could just be a coincidence???

any thoughts?

[gkreidl]

I am having problems running certain videos. I don't know why it plays some find and not others. The codec on the offending videos seems to be div3 ... There are no audio problems, but either omx player immediately closes when I try to run this video or vlc plays it but the video is mostly frozen hmmm
omx player also crashes during playback of video files that it does manage to play.
Maybe I need a codec pack ???? : /
am downloading the videos via deluge torrent.
I am even considering it has something to do with this, because I haven't yet seen a problem with playing videos via usb pen drive from another computer, although that could just be a coincidence???

any thoughts?

run
omxplayer -i filepath
and perhaps
mediainfo filepath
I think "div3" was a very special format which is not supported by the GPU.

[benhull]

Raspberry Pi 3

Will KWEB3 be upgraded to take advantage of the Pi 3's architecture and performance improvements?

We have a project running on KWEB3 on Pi 2s. But it occasionally crashes - it is fairly graphical and intensive in playing videos. We wondered if the Pi 3 might resolve this issue by being able to cope with a little bit more than the Pi 2.

[gkreidl]

Raspberry Pi 3

Will KWEB3 be upgraded to take advantage of the Pi 3's architecture and performance improvements?

We have a project running on KWEB3 on Pi 2s. But it occasionally crashes - it is fairly graphical and intensive in playing videos. We wondered if the Pi 3 might resolve this issue by being able to cope with a little bit more than the Pi 2.

The video player of the webkit3 engine (based on gstreamer-1.0 and the gst.omx module) has some bugs. That's outside of my control. I can only send bug reports to the developers.
Otherwise kweb(3) does profit from the better performance of the RPi3, of course.
BTW, we're in the final stage of kweb-1.7 development now (the new manual is just being proof read) and it will soon become available.

[benhull]

Otherwise kweb(3) does profit from the better performance of the RPi3, of course.

Ok, that's good. But is there any merit in KWEB3 having any aspects recoded to utilise the 64 bit CPU? Or does that not make any sense?.. I know at one stage when Windows 7 took advantage of 64 bit architecture, that suddenly apps needing rewriting to make the most of that. Didn't know if it was the same situation for the Pis?

BTW, we're in the final stage of kweb-1.7 development now (the new manual is just being proof read) and it will soon become available.

Sweet

Thanks.

[gkreidl]

Ok, that's good. But is there any merit in KWEB3 having any aspects recoded to utilise the 64 bit CPU? Or does that not make any sense?.. I know at one stage when Windows 7 took advantage of 64 bit architecture, that suddenly apps needing rewriting to make the most of that. Didn't know if it was the same situation for the Pis?
....

64 Bit wouldn't make any difference at all and neither would compilation for ARMv7. But recompiling some parts of the engine to ARMv7 might improve performance (gstreamer, JavaScript engine etc.).

[benhull]

64 Bit wouldn't make any difference at all and neither would compilation for ARMv7. But recompiling some parts of the engine to ARMv7 might improve performance (gstreamer, JavaScript engine etc.).

Ok, thanks for that. Do you know if and when such changes might be implemented?

I appreciate this could be a little way off but just wanting to plan for the future and consider whether its best to wait on upgrading to Pi 3 after such updates are made.

Thanks for all you're doing!

[gkreidl]

[
Ok, thanks for that. Do you know if and when such changes might be implemented?

I appreciate this could be a little way off but just wanting to plan for the future and consider whether its best to wait on upgrading to Pi 3 after such updates are made.

Thanks for all you're doing!

No idea. But the Rpi3 performance gain is about 160% without any software changes.

[gkreidl]

The kweb 1.7.0 package has just been published!
Besides lots of improvements it includes new manuals for both kweb and omxplayerGUI.
Users of kweb 1.6.9 can use the upgrade function on the menu page.

[cjan]

thank you.
how can import bookmark and set fonts size?

[gkreidl]

kweb can now play 360p video inside the browser on a RPi3 without any problems (this has been only possible in kweb3 so far, using GPU acceleration). But it can even do more. There's a hidden feature built into kweb:

First you need to do an apt-get update && upgrade to get the latest libav libraries with NEON support.
Then you have to run the ytdl-server (start it from the kweb's application page, for example), when you want to use this feature.
Go to a youtoube video page, disable "omxplayer" and click the "Play" button.
After a few seconds, the video will be opened in a new page, with only the built-in video player in the center, and start playing in 720p resolution. A few frames may be lost from time to time , but it's almost perfect and really watchable.


Note: This does only work on an RPi3 and only in kweb. In kweb3 video playback would even be better, because of GPU support, but the video player is so buggy that it leads to memory corruption and even may crash the browser after a while. Therefore I have disabled this feature in kweb3 for now.

[Sauced Apples]

Hey

I am wanting to run kweb on start (which is working) but i am wanting this to be full screen without any bars/controls/etc

Can this be done?

[gkreidl]

Hey

I am wanting to run kweb on start (which is working) but i am wanting this to be full screen without any bars/controls/etc

Can this be done?

Yes, this is called kiosk mode. There are different ways to do this (using the configuration page or a script file).
You've got an extensive manual which explains everything.

[Sauced Apples]

Hey

I am wanting to run kweb on start (which is working) but i am wanting this to be full screen without any bars/controls/etc

Can this be done?

Yes, this is called kiosk mode. There are different ways to do this (using the configuration page or a script file).
You've got an extensive manual which explains everything.

Thanks, I was using -k not -K

Another issue I have run into is the cursor.

No matter what css or javascript I apply, when I touch an image (changes on touch) it changes fine but the cursor shows for a limited time.

Is there a way to stop the cursor appearing? I've also tried changing the cursor file to a 100% transparent .cur with no luck.

[gkreidl]

If you don't boot into the desktop but use xinit and a kiosk script, you can use matchbox-window-manager, which can be started with a "no cursor" option. This method has been successfully used by a number of digital signage applications.

[Sauced Apples]

Thanks for the quick reply.

Are there any existing examples to do this as I'm quite new to all of this.

[gkreidl]

Thanks for the quick reply.

Are there any existing examples to do this as I'm quite new to all of this.

The last chapters of the manual (Part 3) contains a lot of hints and a few complete examples. Developers of embedded applications can also contact me via PM (and the per email).