[LAD] Portable user interfaces for LV2 plugins

Olivier Guilyardi list at samalyse.com
Wed Mar 2 15:58:02 UTC 2011


On 03/02/2011 03:30 PM, Stefano D'Angelo wrote:

> Let's try to make everybody (un)happy:
> http://blogs.sonyericsson.com/developerworld/2011/02/24/webgl-support-in-the-android-web-browser/

Pretty amazing.

> However, as I see it now, this is a possible list of GUI techonologies
> that may be worth considering:
> 1. HTML/JS/CSS (web UIs)
> 2. OpenGL (advanced UIs)
> 3. GTK+ and Qt (almost all current LV2 desktop hosts use either)
> 4. EFL (might be sound on "very embedded" devices)
> 5. SDL (as portable as possible)
> 
> plus all of the combinations of the above.
> 
> How to decide what to do? Let's choose targets...

You are focusing on the GUI technology but you are leaving aside the question of
the communication between UI and audio processing. Choosing a GUI technology
will have consequences on that.

With native OpenGL, both the draw() and run() method would reside in the same
.so, and the plugin could perform high-performance IPC internally, within a
single process.

Just an example: a compressor plugin which shows the input and the output
waveform in realtime, for visual feedback of the applied compression.

I think that what I'm saying about OpenGL about internal IPC also applies to the
other technologies that you mention, apart from the web UI.

So, with a web UI and even with WebGL, what are your ideas for communicating
between the UI and the audio processing thread/process?

--
  Olivier



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