"Adam D. Moss" <adam@uunet.pipex.com> writes:
>
> Alan Cox:
> >> There is, I think, still room for bumming X implementations and protocols
> >> a bit before giving up on it.
> >
> >Plenty of it. Adding support for acceleration of image scaling, and video
> >scaling would help too.
>
> I completely agreed, and suggested almost exactly that to the X people
> a couple of years ago (Ralph Swick specifically, IIRC).
>
> The response was, 'that's kinda what PEX is meant for'.
>
> But now PEX is largely an ex-parrot for one reason or another,
> OpenGL is lovely but quite heavyweight and doesn't slot into the
> X architecture seamlessly (unless you have an SGI, and then only
> to an extent), and a few extentions to the drawable featureset
> would go down very nicely.
>
> XCopyScaledArea(display, src, dest, gc, src_x, src_y, src_width,
> src_height, dest_x, dest_y, dest_width, dest_height)
> Display *display;
> Drawable src, dest;
> GC gc;
> int src_x, src_y;
> int dest_x, dest_y;
> int src_width, src_height;
> int dest_width, dest_height;
>
> That sort of thing.
>
> Better if it were an official X extension than an xf86 one, certainly.
> And long overdue.
I may be off base here, but have you looked at XIE (X Image Extension)?
It does quite a few image manipulations in the server along with such
useful stuff as decompression/compression of images. So you can for
example send a G4 compressed bitmap to the server, decompress it,
scale it (including scale to grey) and display it. XIE is not
restricted to bitmaps.
It already has a software implementation and parts could be rewritten
to take advantage of any useful hardware you have lying around.
Everytime I display an image using xv I think to myself "Why doesn't
xv use XIE if available?"
Cheers,
Stephen
-- Stephen Rothwell Stephen.Rothwell@canb.auug.org.au