Media Player Browser

Along with YouTube and SoundCloud, adding a separate option that would simply just be a browser. If this was added, you could play any form of media easily. The screen would be synchronized with other players, and upon opening it, it would take you to google or another search engine. If you wanted to watch a video or movie off the browser, you could just press the full screen button and let it do it’s magic.

I’m aware of the egregious amount of work it takes to get different formats for the media player to run, but the options we have now are just too limited. The theater can’t even be used to watch movies unless you can find some youtuber-made original movie. Adding a browser would not only give access to more content and material, but also keep the developers from having to work on different formats, thus giving them more time to work on other features.

Don’t you know how much people would post 18+ adult content

If you have media admin permissions you can already do that though.

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Fair enough because most people would go to stuff like pornhub and other naughty suff

I don’t think the devs would be against implementing something like this, but implementing something like this would present a major technical hurdle more than anything.

Rabb.it (now defunct) had this exactly, but it used virtual machines running a web browser, which wouldn’t be a viable option. Having the host screen share a window would also result in things being perfectly synced, but would have the same issues (plus, you’re hosting a condo and streaming video, so performance would also be an issue).

You could also try having the browser run on each client and synchronize the mouse cursor and open webpage, but any differences in page loading (buffering, ad placement, etc.) would throw things off entirely. Same goes for any website without a synchronization API, since any buffering would make things no longer synced.

This is also ignoring the current web browser’s codec issues that prevent livestreams from working properly. Syncing raw video files (rather than entire webpages) would be a lot more viable (and is basically what the first option boils down to), but I’m sure that has its own share of issues.

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I mean, the current media players already use the steam browser to display the videos. Just zoom out to show the whole page instead of just the video

I thought this was no longer the case since Steam changed its browser a while ago, and TU is using UE4’s built-in Chromium library.

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Oh, shit. I totally forgot about that. You’re right.

Do you know what the Chromium library entails? I would at least like to know what is consists of, whether or not it can run a browser or only a specific webpage, things like that.

It means that UE4 can use Chromium’s (Chrome without the Google) functionalities.

I don’t know how much of Chromium’s feature set (API) is implemented in UE4 by default, but from what I know, for example, some proprietary codecs, like H.264 which is used in streaming video, are missing.