In the DataMiner 10.0.10+ versions, there is a known issue with VLC plugin where it can only be used with IE browser. VLC Visio Links in dataminer X – DataMiner Dojo provides a workaround so that VLC plugins can be used in the Visio shapes.
However with the recent announcement from Microsoft, The future of Internet Explorer on Windows 10 is in Microsoft Edge | Windows Experience Blog, IE will be out of support completely by June 15th, 2022. So what is the future and path forward for VLC plugin in the DataMiner?
Internet Explorer as a standalone webbrowser application will have its support ended by 2022 indeed. However, the Internet Explorer browser engine (MSHTML) has support until 2029 (see references). This engine is embedded in Cube in the same way as it is available as IE Mode in the Edge browser.
The alternative when using the Chrome/CefSharp browser engine is to provide video thumbnails or streams in an HTML5-compatible format using open standard video and audio codecs (VP9, Opus). If the need arises, we can also embed VLC natively in Cube using libvlcsharp.
References:
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/lifecycle/products/internet-explorer-11
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/DeployEdge/edge-ie-mode
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/lifecycle/faq/internet-explorer-microsoft-edge#what-if-my-enterprise-line-of-business–lob–application-has-a-dependency-on-a-version-of-internet-explorer-that-reached-end-of-support-
Currently VLC offers two native browser plugins, one is ActiveX for IE and the other is NPAPI for other browsers. Once installed, native browser plugins have full access to the client pc, which has a lot of security concerns. Secondly, mobile devices became very popular, on which these native browser plugins don’t work. So web browsers started to drop support for native plugins, and standard HTML5 alternatives were introduced, which is safer and works on any device. Very popular plugins back in the day are now all deprecated (Flash, Silverlight, and many others). Newer versions of VLC, like VLC 4, will probably not include the browser plugins anymore.
So the path forward is to stop using the VLC plugin and to use an HTML5 compatible alternative. DataMiner already has an HTML5 compatible video player, and in future DataMiner versions we could also add support for DASH and HLS streams, without the need of having to install VLC.
VLC could also be directly integrated into Cube (see Bert’s answer), but this won’t work in the mobile apps like Monitoring and Dashboards.
I guess there will be lots of customer which don’t have HLS streams, but tons of transport streams floating around the house. They will not be happy to have to convert all the streams. It will still take some time until all have changed to use DASH and HLS for all streams.
Wim, thanks for the response. You have provided the background and also the path forward but I can only chose one correct answer on Dojo. Ideally for this question, I should be selecting both responses as valid answers.