Exposing native surface or opengl handle

[Robert Krüger]

On Thu, Jun 26, 2014 at 9:40 AM, John Hendrikx <hjohn at xs4all.nl> wrote:
>
> On 13/06/2014 08:57, Robert Krüger wrote:
>>
>> Hi,
>>
>> it has been discussed a number of time in the passed but let me
>> quickly summarize:
>>
>> A number of people have requested a feature that provides the ability
>> to have native code draw into a surface provided by a JavaFX
>> application as fast as technically possible, i.e. with no indirection
>> or copying because use cases for this were mostly cases where
>> performance was critical, e.g. HD/UHD video players, real-time
>> visualization etc. where losing even e few percent would make a
>> software written in JavaFX unable to compete with native products
>> (e.g. in the video area nobody will use a video player that is not
>> able to play the content smoothly that VLC player or Quicktime can on
>> the same machine).
>
> Although copying is used, I've combined JavaFX and VLC in this fashion for
> over a year already, and video is smooth and stable -- stable enough to
> watch full length HD movies, at 20% increased speed (the speed I normally
> watch them).
>
> Of course, if the target machine is barely able to play these, then the
> extra copying overhead (which is smaller than people think) may be too much.

Yes and this becomes more and more a problem of not so weak machines
when you go to higher resolutions than FHD that you can display well
on a Retina display and thus a competitive disadvantage when targeting
that market. I agree that for a lot of video applications the copying
approach is probably good enough, though.

Robert