Animated MemoryImageSource

[Tamas Bara]

Hi,

I wrote an application that displays continuously images
retreived by a framegrabber. Currently I use the MemoryImageSource
class. The grayscale image data is stored in a byte array which is
steadily updated by a native dll.

Here is the code of the displaying canvas:

private class RealDisplay extends Canvas
{
private Image image;

public RealDisplay()
{
ComponentColorModel colorModel =
new CommponentColorModel(
ColorSpace.getInstance( ColorSpace.CS_GRAY ),
new int[] { 8 }, false, false,
ColorModel.OPAQUE, DataBuffer.TYPE_BYTE );

producer = new MemoryImageSource( imgWidth, imgHeight,
colorModel, FrameGrabber.getImageData(), 0, imgWidth );
producer.setAnimated( true );
image = createImage( producer );
}

public void update( Graphics g )
{
g.drawImage( image, 0, 0, Display.this );
}

public void paint( Graphics g )
{
g.drawImage( image, 0, 0, Display.this );
}
}

Here is the run method of the updating thread:

public void run()
{
while( update )
{
FrameGrabber.grab();
producer.newPixels();
canvas.repaint();
}
}

The FrameGrabber.grab() method updates the byte array which was before
passed to
the MemoryImageSource constructor.

My Questions are:

Why do I have to call the newPixels() method of the producer although I
did not assign any ImageConsumer to it? ( This method seems to demand
a lot of CPU power )
What other classes could I use to achieve a better performance?