[LV2] inline plugin displays

[Robin Gareus]

On 03/16/2016 10:49 PM, David Robillard wrote:
> 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 

[..]

> 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. 

Agreed. Which is exactly why I didn't propose this extension as an UI.

(no port events, no dedicated instantiate, not UI events).

Think of it as a "lv2:Worker" thread which works in the background and
generates an image. That would be my proposed fallback solution:
defining a few URIs to ship out the image on an Atom port. Though I'll
have to do my homework regarding performance there first.

IMHO inline-displays are orthogonal to a new UI type. That being said I
do very much welcome proposals to add a dedicated ui:argb32 LV2 GUI
type, or even better ui:cairo_t  Any takers?

ciao,
robin