Hello Clutterists ;)

well, i am reading here for a while now and plan to create some new
media playback/htpc like application ... well ... with a unique UI
experience ... but thats another story ... ;)

hmm, to check performance, i have tried "snappy" which is a simple
clutter media player - but the performance of the gst-clutter thing was
not satisfying ... i am focusing on a very low power solution ... 

my first thought was using a beagleboard as i got clutter working there
using angstrom distribution ... but i doubt it would be fast enough to
decode (and deinterlace) even standard DVB-T mpeg2 streams (being
720x576 interlaced video here) ... 

however, next i tried a zotac z-box (has amd E350 and ati vision
hardware) - but this was also not able to scale the video (i tried
680x336 xvid mp4 @ 25fps) up to 1920x1200 smoothly ... i tried snappy
there from ubuntu 11.10

so the next thing was google and it turned out that displaying the video
heavily depends on the shaders and therefore on the gpu power ... i also
expect that gstreamer doesnt use any hardware acceleration (like e.g.
xvmc, vdpau?) when decoding into a texture ... or am i wrong here ?

so, my next idea is to just have the ui in clutter and use whatever
video player (ffmpeg, mplayer, etc) for media playback (which utilizes
full hardware acceleration - when available) ... and this leads to the
following two approaches: 

1) use clutter (on X) either fullscreen or windowed (without
windowmanager decorations) and start/stop mplayer (either windowed or
fullscreen above - in terms of windowmanager) - this way i can have a
nice gui, but cannot have any clutter gui on top of mplayer ... so
either nice GUI - or video playback (it's what freevo does (at least in
the 1.x version)) ....

2) use clutter windowed (without windowmanager decorations) and mplayer
(also windowed) in a window below (in terms of windwomanager). but, to
have the mplayer window visible through the gui it would be necessary to
have the clutterwindow transparent on some places (e.g. at any pixel
where there is nothing to paint, the window is fully transparent - a la
"bluebox" effect)

i know that transparent windows are possible with "normal" X windows
(see the border for gkrellm for example - and i think there once was
xclock ;)).

but the questions is if this is also possible with a OpenGL window - i
think i havent seen such a thing yet ;) - i am wondering how the
antialiasing  against the background (if any) would be done in this
case ... therefore i think there is no such thing as a partly
transparent OpenGL Window ... 

To not get me wrong, let me explain: i dont mean the "full-window"
transparency i can get using xcomposite - i mean that some areas of the
window are fully transparent and others are fully opaque - otherwise the
ui controls would also be transparent - which is not what i want ... ;)

another way could be to use efl for all that (but thats not really
related to this mailinglist ;)) - and at first sight, clutter seems to
be the far more easy approach ;)

well, i know this is not really clutter-only related, but i think you
guys here are exactly the right ones to ask such a question ;)

any comments welcome !!!

regards & thanks for all the great work !!!
marcus. 


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