Video display, frame rate 640x480 @ 30fps achievable?

[Michael Sparks]

Guenter wrote:

> I need to develop an application that displays video 640x480 16-bit per
> pixel with 30 fps .... it is possible to achieve that frame rate and still
> have some resources for other processing left? 

Yes.

Co-incidentally we've been looking at video playback this week as well. 
We've been using Pygame with an Overlay surface, and it works fairly well.
Initially we're testing with simple IYUV raw video data, and it's a good 
idea to use a modern video card supported by your OS, but other than that 
we've not had problems. If you're interested in code, let us know :-)

If you end up using the framebuffer device in linux under xorg's X11 (not
exactly an ideal setup for video playback anyway!) there is a little oddity
that we found, due to SDL underneath, but we've been able to work
around that. The system I'm working on normally has that issue, and as
a result isn't accelerated and is a 1.6Ghz machine, but can do standard
defintion video (720x576) playback happily at >30fps. Normally though
most people can offload this to their graphics card so there shouldn't
be issues on your 1Ghz machine.

Clearly if you're interested in driving that you need to decode some data
source to IYUV, but that's a different issue. 

People have embedded pygame in wxPython before (I don't know how
though, I've only seen screenshots of the integration) so although you said
wxPython and might've discounted pygame based on that, it might still be
suitable for you. 

Regards,


Michael.