[compiz] state of blur plugin

[David Reveman]

On Wed, 2007-02-07 at 10:45 -0700, Mike Cook wrote: 
> >>> On Tue, Feb 6, 2007 at  6:02 PM, David Reveman wrote:
> > Some additional options have been added to the decorators which allow
> > you to make any translucent decorations blur what's behind them.
> > Applications can also use the hint recognized by the blur plugin to
> > specify blurred regions.
> 
> Would it make sense to add an option to the blur plugin to specify windows
> (types, or maybe by some window picker method) to enable alpha blur on
> by default, instead of making the application do it?  Maybe it should work
> this way already and it just isn't for me, but currently my gnome-terminal
> is transparent but not blurred (though decorations are) unless I enable it
> with the blurset utility you made available.

I guess it makes sense to allow people to force windows to be blurred in
the same way that it makes sense to allow people to force opacity of
windows. The current type mask is pretty limited though. It seem to me
that we need this new extensible window matching option for things like
this to actually be useful. I've got a better idea of how we should
implement that now so I'll probably get that done in the next couple of
days.

> 
> > I've added two small utility programs to git.compiz.org:
> > 
> > git.compiz.org/blurset
> > and
> > git.compiz.org/blurdemo
> > 
> > blurset, is similar to transset except that it allow you turn on/off
> > blur behind translucent parts of any application window.
> > 
> > blurdemo, is just a simple gtk example app that uses the blur support
> > provided by the blur plugin.
> 
> I like the look of your blurdemo window, very nice.  Anyway, I noticed two
> odd little things which are illustrated in the following images:
> http://i154.photobucket.com/albums/s273/m1kecook/Compiz/blur_selectunder.png
> http://i154.photobucket.com/albums/s273/m1kecook/Compiz/blur_unminimize.png
> 
> The first, blur_selectunder, shows what happens if I drag a selection on
> the desktop which goes underneath a blurred window.  This happens for
> any blur, not just blurdemo.  The second is perhaps just something with
> the blurdemo app itself, but happens if I minimize and then unminimize it.

These issues should be fixed now.

> 
> Great work on the blur, btw, as I'm getting excellent performance...  Now
> to see if I can experiment with some cool filters.  :)

The 4xBilinear filter is pretty crappy but a good example. I've added
two more useful filters. I gaussian filter and a mipmap filter. The
gaussian filter definitely produces highest quality results but for
reasonable performance we need to do the filtering in two passes so it
requires FBO's. The mipmap filter can give you a lot of blurring while
still being pretty fast (depends on how well accelerated hardware mipmap
generation is though) but the quality is not as good as what the
gaussian filter can produce.

If you manage to create some other useful filters please let us know!

- David