Off-screen rendering with webview2

[ajaymonga]

Hi
Is it possible to get webview2 to render into a shared memory region like CEF :
https://bitbucket.org/chromiumembedded/cef/wiki/GeneralUsage#markdown-header-off-screen-rendering

In my application I use 2 process architecture where main process does not have network access and second process uses CEF to render webcontent into a shared memory region from where main app can read the pixels. I am wondering if I can achieve this using webview2

Thanks

AB#28491736

[champnic]

Currently this is not possible. We have offscreen rendering on our backlog, and are tracking it in #20, but I think this ask is clearer so I'll also add this issue to our item. Thanks!

[Harvey3141]

Hi, do you have any updates on this which you're able to share?

[champnic]

Unfortunately not yet. We have not begun work on this yet. This is a large amount of work, and while very high on our priority list, gets bumped each quarter as higher priority asks come in. I really want to do this work as it's currently one of our top asks, but the earliest that could happen is Q1 2022 at this point.

[avail]

Any news on this?

[champnic]

We are starting on the design phase of this work. Would you mind sharing your use case so that we can consider it in our plans?

[doxxx]

We are currently using CefSharp to render into an offscreen buffer that is sent to an FPGA to be composited onto a live video feed. The render includes playback of MPEG4-encoded video. We were looking into using WebView because CefSharp's default Chromium build does not include the MPEG4 codec. But without offscreen rendering, that's a moot point. We've since produced our own custom build of Chromium to include the codec.

[rjx-ray]

Our use case is to show web content in our immersive VR spaces. See https://www.igloovision.com/software/enterprise-package/igloo-web

We need access to the web rendered textures so that we can warp and blend multiple images to projector outputs to create a clear seamless view on the inside of a cylinder or room.

Currently we use CEF for the web input with a user maintained patch for getting the shared textures. See https://bitbucket.org/chromiumembedded/cef/pull-requests/285 and read down to the end of the comments for full details. We build CEF with proprietary codecs included. The builds of our app and CEF are done with C++.

This is unsatisfactory because it uses the deprecated custom compositing (which could be removed in future) instead of skia and is difficult to keep updated.

We would look at moving to webview2 if access to the rendered textures could be provided and supported along with the ability to include proprietary codecs

[champnic]

Thanks for the info @rjx-ray! If you don't need high-frequency rendering you could consider using the CapturePreview function to get an image, but this isn't great for things like videos or other animations.

[rjx-ray]

Hi @champnic, thanks for the response but we do need high-frequency rendering, typically for YouTube and other web video display.