HTML5 video is really nice and all but one annoying thing is the lack of fullscreen video specification, it is currently up to the User-Agent to allow fullscreen video display.
WebKit allows a fullscreen button in the media controls and Safari can, on user-demand only, switch a video to fullscreen and display nice controls over the video. There’s also a webkit-specific DOM API that allow custom media controls to also make use of that feature, as long as it is initiated by a user gesture. Vimeo’s HTML5 player uses that feature for instance.
Thanks to the efforts made by Igalia to improve the WebKit GTK+ port and its GStreamer media-player, I have been able to implement support for this fullscreen video display feature. So any application using WebKitGTK+ can now make use of it :)
The way it is done with this first implementation is that a new fullscreen gtk+ window is created and our GStreamer media-player inserts an autovideosink in the pipeline and overlays the video in the window. Some simple controls are supported, the UI is actually similar to Totem’s. One improvement we could do in the future would be to allow application to override or customize that simple controls UI.
The nice thing about this is that we of course use the GstXOverlay interface and that it’s implemented by the linux, windows and mac os video sinks :) So when other WebKit ports start to use our GStreamer player implementation it will be fairly easy to port the feature and allow more platforms to support fullscreen video display :)
Benjamin also suggested that we could reuse the cairo surface of our WebKit videosink and paint it in a fullscreen GdkWindow. But this should be done only when his Cairo/Pixman patches to enable hardware acceleration land.
So there is room for improvement but I believe this is a first nice step for fullscreen HTML5 video consumption from Epiphany and other WebKitGTK+-based browsers :) Thanks a lot to Gustavo, Sebastian Dröge and Martin for the code-reviews.