Re: Hardware Accelleration / Playing Video

Question

Yes, such image indeed will not be accelerated - because you have the pointer to the raw data.
Here is an approach which I've suggested to other people with similar issues.
Create a VolatileImage
Copy your BufferedImage to this volatile image
copy the volatile image to the back-buffer
This approach especially helps if you need to copy the image to the backbuffer more often that it's updated by the video stream, or if you need to scale the frames (in the last case you'll need to use -Dsun.java2d.ddscale=true parameter if you're running on windows, or the opengl pipeline with -Dsun.java2d.opengl=true if your hardware/drivers is supported).
Take a look at this thread on javagaming.org which discusses almost exactly the same case as yours:
http://www.javagaming.org/forums/index.php?topic=12453.msg100335#msg100335
Thank you,
Dmitri
Java2D Team

Answer 1

Thank you very much dmitri, the thread you linked showed me just how to make it work. Now I can get 30fps with two videos at once.
Previously, I was trying to build up a BufferedImage from a 24bit RGB array of pixels, which I don't think is compatible with most hardware acceleration. Now I get a pointer to a 32bit RGBA array, using:
BufferedImage videoImage;
GraphicsConfiguration gc = videoCanvas.getGraphicsConfiguration();
videoImage = gc.createCompatibleImage(vidWidth, vidHeight);     
pixelData = ((DataBufferInt) videoImage.getRaster().getDataBuffer()).getData();With minor changes to my C code I store the pixels in this buffer instead. This works much better, as the resulting BufferedImage is hardware accelerated. I then can render this BufferedImage straight to the screen, with scaling, very quickly.
Rendering it first to a VolitileImage was causing problems for me, as performance would slow down for some reason if I changed the window's size at all while it was running.