Qt 4.6, now with improved DirectFB support!

As of Qt 4.6 massive improvements have been made to the QWS/DirectFB driver.

While there has been some support of DirectFB since Qt 4.3, 4.6 comes with significant improvements in terms of performance, stability and features. This release has been validated on several media platforms in the home entertainment sphere like DTVs, set-top boxes and Blu-Ray players. We even got the code reviewed by Denis Oliver Kropp of www.directfb.org during a "hackathon" in Oslo this summer.

http://www.directfb.org

DirectFB is an open source project that provides an abstraction on top of proprietary graphics hardware acceleration. It has proven to be particularly successful on embedded systems that provide specialized 2D/video playback acceleration. It is the de-facto standard on internet-connected HD TVs and set-top boxes that run Linux. From Qt's perspective it provides a nice way to abstract out proprietary interfaces. We've achieved animations with upwards of 30 fps on High Definition resolutions (1080/720) mass-market hardware.

Qt uses DirectFB for the following operations:
- Access to hw-accelerated blitting and paint operations (QPainter)
- Video memory buffer management and image decoding(QPixmaps)
- Window composition/management and synchronization with screen refresh rates (QWS)
- Input device events (keyboard/mouse/joystick/touchscreen/remote control) (QEvents)

Planned features in future releases include support for NPAPI plugins (Flash) and better integration with the native DirectFB window management.

- Do you use Qt/DirectFB?
- Would you want to use multiple processes painting to the screen concurrently?
- Do you have feature or documentation requests?
- Do you have bug-reports?

We would love to hear from you! Please report via the normal support channels.

For more technical details on the QWS/DirectFB driver consult:

http://doc.trolltech.com/4.6/qt-embeddedlinux-directfb.html

This contains debugging and profiling aids as well as best practices guidelines. You can explicitly profile when painting operations are accelerated or when they fall back to the underlying raster engine