How to render 8-bit raster graphics

["Janet Mini" <minijanetleung hotmail com>]

Hello all,

I'm new to gtkmm.
I have some 8-bit grayscale images that I want to display in a gtkmm 
application.
I want to display them as a sequence of frames as an animation like a movie 
playback.
And I will also add some texts on top of the animation.

Does anybody have any good idea how to do it properly with performance 
(speed)?

Shall I use the gnome canvas widget?
I tested that I could use a look up table and duplicate my 8-bit data for 
each of the RGB channel and create a RGB pixbuf.
But is it possible that I use the grayscale visual and display just my 8-bit 
grayscale images on the canvas instead of using RGB?

Thank you in advance for any help and suggestion.

Regards,
Janet

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