Display a video stream (successives images)

Question

Hello!
Thanks for looking after my post.
I try to display a video stream (successives images) in Java component.
With a simple swing component, it's not possible to display 25 fps for a 640x480 resolution.
With SWT, we arrive to display about 15 fps for a resolution 640x480 but the use of the CPU is very important.
Do you know an efficient system to display video stream?
Thanks.

Answer 1

Firstly if you're loading images with Toolkit you'll nbeed to use MediaTracker (see the Javadoc for full and clear instructions).
Secondly, be aware of how long it takes to load image data, allocate the memory for it, and decode it. This is where you're going to suffer and it's the fundamental flaw in the plan of simulating video by flipping single frames: it's highly unlikely you'll manage it quickly enough. As above, 50ms is quite optimistic.
You could do your loading up-front and buffer a load of images - there are a few strategies you could use for this. But bear in mind that (a) this is going to be very memory hungry, and (b) if your image load time is greater than your frame display time you're always going to be fighting a losing battle. But it should work for very small animations.
Run yourself some tests: write yourself a simple test class which just loads an image in its main() method using a MediaTracker. It'll tell you how long loading the image takes. Of course, if you're doing it in an applet then you've got all sorts of other factors to consider and the load times will be high.