Re: Refreshing windows as often as possible, but not too often

[Ben Laurie <ben algroup co uk>]

rsmith@xs4all.nl wrote:
> 
> On  9 Oct, Ben Laurie wrote:
> > This is probably a really stupid question, but here goes...
> >
> > For various reasons, which I'll go into if anyone cares, I'm writing a
> > Brooktree video capture prog for GTK. This works fine, but ... I have a
> > really irritating problem. Using a technique copied from, err, somewhere
> > (gnoghurt?), the way I do it is to make a pixmap the background of a
> > window, copy the current frame to the pixmap, and clear the window, with
> > gdk_window_clear(). I do this from an idle function, using
> > gtk_idle_add(). The snag is that it _really_ interferes with user
> > interaction. The mouse is like treacle, it takes ages to shut down,
> > window focus doesn't work, and so on.
> 
> An idle function gets called in every iteration of the main loop. So
> copying the frame to the pixmap every time is bogging down the machine
> unnecesseraly.
> 
> Maybe you can add some code to the idle fuction so that it only copies
> to the pixmap and refreshes the window if the image in the frame has
> changed? That way you refresh as often as is sensible (I mean, why draw
> the same image multiple times?) without bogging down the machine.

Actually, I've tried waiting for a fresh frame each time. Same deal.
Guess I can produce frames faster than X can eat them :-)

But, as you say, the problem is that the idle function is called when
the _client_ is idle. What I need is a function that gets called when
the _server_ is idle!

Cheers,

Ben.

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