Q about fastest display methode

[William Tracy]

Hello,

On Mon, Sep 15, 2008 at 2:05 PM, Aleksandar Lazic <al-xorg at none.at> wrote:
> I want to display some different Image- and Videoformats on different x
> windows provided Linux distributions (Redhat Linux, SuSe Linux, gentoo
> Linux, ...)

Cool. Linux cannot have too many video players. :-)

> I have thought about qt, gtk, wxwidgets, sdl and a lot of some others,
> but I'am not sure which one is the 'best'.

Qt, GTk+, and wxWidgets are all widget sets. They are collections of
prefab buttons, menus, and other "widgets" that you can put on the
screen. They also provide layout managers, that do the hard work or
arranging widgets on the screen in rows or columns.

Qt uses a slightly modified version of C++, and is generally
associated with KDE applications.

GTk+ is designed for straight ANSI C, but bindings for C++ and Python
are available (using the original C version can be a bit verbose); it
is usually associated with Gnome applications.

wxWidgets is a C++ cross-platform wrapper around other widget sets;
you can make wxWidgets programs run on top of Qt, GTk+, or Windows or
OS X widgets on those operating systems.

I'll also mention FLTK; it's fairly obscure, but is small, fast and
lightweight, and written in C++.

SDL is not a widget set. It is a library for multimedia applications,
primarily games, but also for things like videos. It handles
animation, and input devices like joysticks.

> Please try to answer from objective point of view ;-)

I tried. :-)

> 1.) Does I only need the xorg libs or are this libs only for some basic
>     routines and I need more high level libs to fulfill my requirements?

Using Xlib or XCB is fairly low-level. If you want a button, you have
to figure out how to draw it yourself, at best one line at a time, or
at worst one pixel at a time.

> I'am relatively new to the X-Window environment and happy for any help
> ;-)

You will probably want to use an existing widget set for the controls
(play and pause buttons, for example). Since you asked, I'll suggest
either wxWidgets or FLTK.

You will probably want to use something lower-level for the actual
video playback; there are other people on this list who can give much
better advice there.

-- 
William Tracy
afishionado at gmail.com -- wtracy at calpoly.edu

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