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Pete1995's avatar
Pete1995
Channel Surfer
2 years ago

Is pixel-level writing supported?

I want to write a screensaver that displays animated blends/gradients. The algorithms for these would generate sequential pixels in scanline order; I.e, left-to-right, top-to-bottom. Generally, however, it would be useful to have a more general, random access functionality. 

 

I see discussions back as far as 2014 requesting pixel-level access, but nothing in the current, on-line documentation that supports this. There’s a GetByteArray(), but no corresponding SetByteArray().

 

I suppose I could investigate drawing a hundred thousand, 1 pixel long lines, or 720, 1 x 1280 pixel sprites or write it all out to a PNG file and then draw the file, etc., but I don’t think any brute force hack I can think of will be efficient enough for animation.

 

Any help, guidance or insight would be greatly be greatly appreciated.

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3 Replies

  • cocotower's avatar
    cocotower
    Roku Guru
    2 years ago

    There's a typical way of doing stuff like this when an API doesn't allow framebuffer access.  I haven't tried it yet it with Roku yet but essentally you create a large bitmap image in memory and display it or update whatever object it's bound to.  For Roku I guess it would need to be in PNG format.  It's probably even faster than direct screen memory access.  I do something similar but in raw bitmap format for an Android app I wrote.  The framerate is pretty fast because I write 32-bit values for each pixel in aRGB format. 

    • Pete1995's avatar
      Pete1995
      Channel Surfer
      11 months ago

      Thanks for the reply. I also came to the conclusion that going through the filesystem is the only way to get pixel data into a bitmap/screen. 

      FYI: PNG was not an option, as you can only write to PNG from a Bitmap, not a ByteArray. I went with BMP: simple header, no compression.  But you gotta deal with the BRG vs RGB issue, though. The Pixel Masks in the BMP header are ignored by Roku.