31 Jan 2014

Improving presentation on Wayland

In the last two (or three?) weeks at Collabora I have been looking into a Wayland protocol extension that would allow accurately timed presentation. Accurate timing is essential for two quite different use cases: video playback with audio/video synchronization, and interactive GUI with just-in-time redrawing. Video playback with A/V sync was our primary goal when we started working on this, and there is Frederic Plourde's first proposal from October 2013. Since then I have realized that also other kinds of applications need timings, especially feedback on when their content updates were shown, and when is the next chance to show an update (vblank). Primarily my re-design started with the aim to improve resizing performance when I got the assignment from Daniel Stone to push Wayland presentation protocol forward. The RFC v2 of Wayland presentation extension is now out for review and discussion.