Re: Component for showing animated GIFs or AVI

Günter Kieninger wrote:

In article <memo.20080626101057.7592A@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
Matthew Jones wrote:
I just downloaded Melander's TGifImage, read the instructions on
how to make it use threads, and it worked. I don't have any info
beyond that.

Hmm, now I played around with settings of Drawoptions (I use a TImage
to show the gif). But everytime I have a Sleep(1000) in the
Mainthread the animation is stopping until the sleep is over.
TAnimate is working fine but is not transparent and TJvGifANimator is
flickering very hard.
I have to decide between ugly controls which are working or nice
controls which are not working while a sleep(...)

You have to remember the facts.

1) VCL is NOT thread safe.
2) What ever you do with a TImage, TGifImage etc they will always use
the main thread for drawing.
3) in order to have a completly disconnected window that can be used
(drawen to) by a thread you need to make sure that you will not use
any delphi forms or any vcl components in there.

I think there are ways to full the end user to beleive that what he is
seeing is a trasparent animation but you will not find any VCL that can
play an animation outside the main thread.

You need to get down to Windows API calls to create the windows and the
control that will play the animation. Also you need to make sure that
after it starts playing it will not interact with the main thread or
vcl in any way (not with out synchronisation).

regards
Yannis.
--

.

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