[LV2] inline plugin displays

[David Robillard]

On Tue, 2016-03-15 at 03:47 +0100, Robin Gareus wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> Here's another small ad-hoc LV2 extension. I've just prototyped adding
> inline mixer-strip displays. A picture says more than words here:
> 
>   http://robin.linuxaudio.org/tmp/inline_display.png
> 
> small LV2 UIs; display only (non interactive) pixmaps.
> 
> The API consists of two calls:
> 
> 1) A LV2 extension provided by the plugin to render a pixmap.
> 
> This is function is provided by the plugin's shared-object itself (not
> the GUI) because it must also be available when the plugin GUI is not
> visible (not even loaded). It's intended for visualizing the most
> relevant plugin parameters in a tiny area (~100x100px).

There is a longish discussion on IRC about this, but in summary, I think
this should indeed be a UI (perhaps using a new ARGB32 UI type, which
should be straightforward to define), and not part of the plugin DSP
code.

It does not make sense to force all plugins and hosts to generate image
data on the DSP side and ship that off to the UI for display, for a long
list of reasons I assume are mostly obvious.  But, to avoid too tedious
of a discussion, I could sum it up with: the *possibility* of DSP/UI
separation in LV2 is non-negotiable.  UIs are free to use instance
access if their particular case is not suitable for true separation.

I like the goal, but the method is flawed.

-- 
dr