Look - it moves

Today is ugly-hack day. BADGE has a nice feature that has no real counter-part in the Qtopia API. This means that I have to dynamically cast the painter engine for a given widget and provide some additional methods in the BADGE version.

The feature of the day is to integrate a live video stream with the Qtopia interface. BADGE supports video through “blue screening”. This means that a given colour is replaced by the video stream. The video itself can be translated and scaled, making it possible to have BADGE put video in a moveable, resizable window – but let’s not get carried away.


Using just a few lines of code, we can get a video stream into the user interface. All is handled by the BADGE hardware – remember that our CPU is running at 180 MHz and uses a 60 MHz bus to access the BADGE GPU so we cannot handle it through it. The video below shows the video running together with Qwt. The video quality isn’t really HDTV – I only had a mobile phone to film with, but it shows the principle.



So, it seems that it is fully possible to accelerate Qtopia using BADGE. Actually, it was easier than I first expected. However, it is far from possible to accelerate everything – at least with a reasonable effort. IMHO it seems more efficient (man-hour-wise) to provide a clean acceleration driver and write one’s applications with care than to spend man-years creating an overly complex driver. Having discussed this work with Trolltech, it seems that Qtopia 4.4 will have even more accelerateable features – I’m looking forward to it :-)