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dtourolle 7cc392d78f docs(specs): mpv draws desktop video, and the webview path goes

The spike proved compositing works on Linux, including Wayland, and left two
blockers. One is now closed: DR-228 measured a single EXT-X-STREAM-INF in the
server's master playlist, so there is no adaptive bitrate for mpv to lose and
finding 3 of playback-backend-unification.md is false. The spike is updated to
record that. The other — an unexplained SIGSEGV in a decoder thread — is carried
into the spec as DR-231 rather than chased: the spike had no render-context
teardown at all, which is DR-184 on Android restated, and removing the likeliest
cause is worth doing whether or not it was the cause.

The spec targets every desktop platform rather than Linux alone, because the
maintenance argument runs the other way. Video has three renderers today. A
Linux-only version makes it four, permanently — mpv on Linux, HTML5 on Windows,
ExoPlayer on Android, hls.js underneath — and the webview path then survives
indefinitely because something still needs it. Finishing the job leaves mpv on
desktop and ExoPlayer on Android, and hls.js, html5Adapter.ts, videoLoaderFor
and the <video> element are deleted in a phase that has its own acceptance
criterion so it cannot quietly become "later".

The load-bearing change is DR-233: the device profile stops being a
compile-time platform constant and becomes a property of the renderer that will
decode the stream. The measured 7% desktop direct-play rate and Android's 85%
differ by nothing except which component decodes, so that one change is what
converts the former toward the latter. It looks like configuration and is not —
it decides whether the server re-encodes, and it fails silently when wrong.

Windows is costed rather than waved at: the surface is genuinely different code
(WebView2 in an HWND, not GTK), but everything else is shared, so nothing may be
guarded on cfg!(target_os = "linux"). The real cost is build — libmpv is a
Linux-only dependency while Windows cross-compiles via cargo-xwin, so a Windows
libmpv must reach that build and ship in the NSIS bundle under the LGPL terms
DR-216 already records.

Allocates UR-080, DR-230..236, IR-033. No product code yet.

2026-08-22 13:45:03 +02:00