Hey, my first real post! This is a quick intro to the CanalK project. Not that I think that it will move the world forward, but it might help to understand the next posts. In my school, we previously had TV in the corridors to display pictures, like the posters for the next events. The old system eventually broke, so it was changed by something more modern. In short, a Qt/C++ application fetches slides from a server, and displays them.
Sample screen of CanalK
The application presents itself as follow: there is a large area dedicated to display the content (pictures, videos, web pages), and a not-so-small strip on top of the screen, with our logo, the current time, and a sliding text.
Pretty simple, huh? Not so fast! I must mention that in order to display this application, we use a mini-PC with a wild hot config you can only see in your dreams: Intel Atomshit D510 + Intel icrap915. For starters, you basically take a 10-years old PC, remove some features, and there you go. By the way, at the time screens had a resolution like 800×600, but here we’re talking about 1920×1080. I talked about dreams, did I mention nightmares?
A « Karibox » in action, displaying CanalK
The currently used application is written in plain Qt/C++, and you can find the sources on gitorious. However, it suffers from various lags and other issues because of the poor hardware. After the videos went randomly blinking without a proper reason, I decided to re-write most of it using pure OpenGL.
Let’s hope it works better, see the following posts to find out!