Windowless operation / DirectX integration

[nnemkin]

Please provide an API that doesn't require a HWND parent, something that integrates well with Direct2D, Direct3D and DirectComposition.

I.e. provide (or consume) a DXGI surface that I can display with the abovementioned APIs + a way to feed input to a WebView + a notification mechanism for visual updates.

AB#28491736

[david-risney]

(Accidentally closed. Reopening)
Thanks, great feature suggestion! We're working on this. Do you have any specific ideas about how you would most like the API to look and why? Thanks!

[nnemkin]

RichEdit has windowless D2D mode, something similar would be nice. A combination of ITextServices2::TxDrawD2D, ITextServices::TxSendMessage and ITextHost::TxInvalidateRect (+ other host methods you find necessary).

Instead of (or in addition to) drawing to D2D context, provide a method to draw into a user specified DXGI surface, which can be shared with both D2D and D3D.

A simple but limited option is to provide a windowless swap chain that can be plugged into DirectComposition.

[pabloko]

Looking into this one, an offscreen rendering mode should be a must-have feature on the component.
Real offscreen, in addition to reliable framebuffer access, should also include access for raw audio and interfaces for input events proxy, as in CEF project that shares chromium codebase, its worth reading this issue from where chromium switched rendering to Viz.
As @nnemkin points out, getting into the swap chain would allow gpu only solution but im afraid this isn't so easy since that lives on another process.

[david-risney]

Thanks for the comment!

We're currently working on a DirectComposition solution where the host app can provide a visual that the WebView content will be rendered into and with explicit APIs for input.

We don't plan on a D2D, DXGI Surface, or DXGI SwapChain based solution but let us know if there are issues with a visual based DirectComposition solution that don't work for you that would be solved by D2D/DXGI.

Can you elaborate on the raw audio comment? Our current plan is for the WebView to produce audio directly without help from the host app.

[pabloko]

Well our use case is to render the webview over live video feed for graphics overlay production.
I think that self explains why I would need access to raw audio/video in some manner, instead drawing to a window and playing trought default device. Many thanks for your comments.

[codecat]

Has there been any significant progress in this area since the last few comments? I'd love to get a WebView rendered on top of a game for its UI. Plugging it directly into D3D would be a really good solution.

[llcepick]

So for the API surface - the ability to ask for a 32-bit RGBA like surface to render to would allow post-render composition - so rendering pages with transparent backgrounds would be able to be composed onto any other surface types. Support for higher-color-bit counts with HDR rendering would be also beneficial into the future as more and more screens are getting higher than 10-bit color support - which would be useful as well. Extending the CaptureRender API to allow for flags to PNG would even be good enough for many of these cases - cause the rendering would typically not need to be 'realtime' for a lot of cases.

Ideally, this should also work if the control is only showing a SVG (instead of a page) - with the alpha channel rendering preserved.

[douglas-jordan]

Rendering into a DC would be great for my usage.