play-with VS gpuweb

Over the past ~10 years, I've come to the conclusion that it's best to just pipe high quality video streams into a high quality cross-platform external video player like mpv[0][1][2].

I can't remember what Firefox uses internally to decode/display different video codecs (ffmpeg like mpv? system builtins? hardware media encode/decode, like on the M1?)

I can't put my finger on exactly why browser video streams feel so bad to me, but they still do. Maybe it's the DOM overhead, or maybe it's something else. My personal takeaway is that browsers still just aren't optimized enough for fast/performant video playback.

[0]: https://mpv.io/

[1]: https://github.com/grmat/play-with

[2]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/play-with/

Works for me.

WebGPU support is behind a couple flags on Linux: https://github.com/gpuweb/gpuweb/wiki/Implementation-Status

People keep spreading this incredibly misleading statement, and yours is even more misleading (suggesting Apple opposed a 'GPU WASM')

By all accounts, Apple's /only/ stance was that if WebGPU used SPIR-V it would be a non-starter for them, due to ongoing legal issues between Apple and Khronos.

Apple actually proposed WebHLSL in collaboration with Microsoft, to have HLSL be the standard.

Mozilla employee's stance[0] was that SPIRV was too low level, did not fit with the goals of WebGPU portability and security, and expressed concern that Khronos may add functionality to SPIRV they cannot support in WebGPU like raytracing instructions .. 'So we'd always be on the verge of forking SPIR-V in some way.'

It was also noted by many people that even if a bytecode format was used, it would still have to be translated to the target (HLSL/DXIL, MSL, etc.) in almost the same way a text format would.

Nobody proposed a 'GPU WASM equivalent' or an alternative bytecode format.

The hard truth is that shader compilation is a fucking nightmare, people do not realize how bad it is across the different native APIs. SPIR-V is good, but it doesn't solve that - and presents other challenges if you are a web browser API. Vulkan and SPIRV are not the golden goose many make them out to be.

[0] https://github.com/gpuweb/gpuweb/issues/847#issuecomment-642...

Yes it is still a bit new. WebGPU is not finished and is still being worked on: https://webgpu.io/

WebGPU currently doesn't support the "bindless" resource access model (see: https://github.com/gpuweb/gpuweb/issues/380).

The "max number of sampled texture per shader stage" is a runtime device limit, and the minimal value for that seems to be 16. So texture atlasses are still a thing in WebGPU.

There's even an implementation under discussion to have the dp4a instruction added to WebGPU (https://github.com/gpuweb/gpuweb/issues/2677)