OK, so I am writing an app, which plays music with the pyGST bindings.
This requires the use of threads to handle playback. The bindings library handles most of the thread control for me, which is nice(and what I was looking for in them).
Now, I don't have a full grasp on this concept, so I would be eager for some references. But the way I understand it, is I have to basically inform the app that it can use multiple threads.
I gathered this from the examples on the gstreamer site, where they use this call:
gtk.gdk.threads_init()
gtk.main()
according to here, this tells the app it can use multiple threads(more or less), which is where my above assumption came from.
That is the background. Now get this. I have placed those lines in my code, and they work fine. My app plays music rather than crashing whenever it tries. But something doesn't feel right.
In the examples that I got those lines from, they use gtk for the whole GUI, but I want to use wxWidgets, so it feels wrong calling this gtk function to do this.
Is there a wx equivalent to this? or is it ok to use this, and will it still work cross platform?
Also, I have to figure out how to kill all these threads on exit(which it does not do right now) I see how they do it in the example using a gtk method again, so again, looking for a wx equivalent.
PS: I think this(or the solution) may be related to the wx.App.MainLoop() function, but I am lost in trying to understand how this loop works, so again, good references about this would be appreciated, but I suppose not necessary as long as I have a good solution.
Try using this instead:
import gobject
gobject.threads_init()
I wonder how come it is not written in large print at the start of every python gstreamer plugin piece of documentation: it only took me several hours to find it.
A bit more details here.
I have no experience with pyGST, but the general advice for using threads and wxPython is to only update the GUI from the main thread (i.e. the thread that starts the MainLoop). See http://wiki.wxpython.org/LongRunningTasks for more information.
I have no experience with the python bindings, but I have had success using wxWidgets and GStreamer together on Windows. The problem is that wxWidgets runs a Windows event loop while GStreamer uses a GLib event loop. If you don't care about any of the GStreamer events, you shouldn't need to do anything. However, if you care to receive any of the GStreamer events, you will have to run your own GLib event loop (GMainLoop) in a separate thread with a separate GMainContext. Use gst_bus_create_watch to create a GST event source, add a callback to the source with g_source_set_callback, and then attach it to the main context of your GLib event loop with g_source_attach. You can then handle the GST in the callback, for example, to forward the events to the wx main event loop.
Related
Discretion: I would like a general guidance for an approach to a project I am working on, so the question is very broad.
I am currently trying to build a GUI to make serial communication with an arduino, a usb camera (the camera has its own python library for controls), and handle real-time data in .dat format that gets updated as this GUI is running.
Right now, I am using threading on python in order to do all of these simultaneously, and I only interact with the script by using input function on python. Once threads start running, I cannot really interact with this script.
I have 3 separate threads running: 1. thread that saves images from the camera 2. thread that sends signals to arduino in every given random timing. 3. thread that waits for an input to terminate the main thread.
Everything works as I desire, but I wish to add GUI to make things more straight forward for others to use the program.
I realized that Qt actually offers all the capabilities that I wish to implement as a part of this program. Yet, I cannot fully understand the scope of Qt library functions I will need to implement everything.
My understanding is that I could use a combination of QWidgets, QTimer and QThreads to try something, but I would like to have some guidance on a more conventional approach to designing such GUI interface to do multitasking. I would like to also display real-time data on graphs including images from the camera and recording voltage data from the data files that gets updated through another program (data gets written to another folder). The program requires tracking of time from finish to end, and I know that threading can be very confusing when it comes to tracking these times. Any reference will be greatly appreciated.
Thanks you all.
I want to look for files with given extensions recursively from a given root directory and to display the number of files currently found in my GUI.
Since this kind of processing may be long, the GUI may be blocked.
I could just wait for the end of the processing and get the file count, but I am learning Qt (PyQt), so I see this as a training.
So I have read Qt doc:
When to Use Alternatives to Threads, and I don't think it's for me.
Then I read:
Choosing an Appropriate Approach, and I think my solution is the first one:
Run a new linear function within another thread, optionally with
progress updates during the run
But in this case you have 3 choices:
Qt provides different solutions:
Place the function in a reimplementation of QThread::run() and start the QThread. Emit signals to update progress. OR
Place the function in a reimplementation of QRunnable::run() and add the QRunnable to a QThreadPool. Write to a thread-safe variable
to update progress. OR
Run the function using QtConcurrent::run(). Write to a thread-safe variable to update progress.
Could you tell me how to choose the best one?
I have read some "solutions" but I'd like to understand why you should use one methodology instead of another one.
And also since I am looking for files, I may have a directory in which many files would match the search criteria. So it would mean lots of interruptions. Is there something special to keep in mind regarding this?
Thank you!
From what I know (hopefully more can chime in).
QThread offers support with signal interaction. For example, you'd be able to stop your concurrent function with a signal. Not sure how you'd do that with the other options, if at all.
Things to keep in mind: widgets all have to live in the main thread, but can communicate with other other threads via signals & slots.
Another quick thread on the topic w/ some decent bullet-points.
https://qt-project.org/forums/viewthread/50165/
Best of luck on your project, and welcome to Qt!
Hi I’m currently working on a project for a videocoacher program for recording and replaying video, as well as showing delayed real-time video, and tracking placement via color.
The software is running on linux , on a 4 core odroid, and initially I started to make it multi threaded with threads implemented as a part of each new class. Each of these threads taking care of their own gui elements.
I’ve later found out that I need to show all gui elements/video in the main/gui thread. Earlier I’ve used opencv and boost. But it seems like using the Qt might be a better idea since some of the code already depends on the QT library. I am currently a novice at programming, and not very familiar with either opencv, qt, or threading.
My question is:
Is this relatively sound as a structure for the program, or is there something inherently wrong with how I am planning to do it now?
Main/GUI Thread
will show all visual & video content
will start a thread for ButtonControl object
ButtonControl
will handle all button input, controlling what happens in the program
depending on what buttons are pressed will start and end threads
like:
StoreToFile object ( starts storing video to a file, while sending a
video stream to GUI thread to show what it is storing in real-time)
ReadFromFile object ( reads the file currently stored and sends data
to display it in GUI thread
DelayedVideoStream object (stores video to buffer, and shows a
continuous delayed view of what happened 5seconds in the past)
ColorTracking object (tracks where a color placement is in the image
)
Kind regards, and thank you for taking the time to look at my question.
TLDR - is a structure where threads are implemented as classes and the image data is sent back to the gui/main thread a decent way to do a multithreaded program ?
Performance-wise, the best approach is not to deal with threads directly at all, but use QtConcurrent::run. It is safe to paint QImages that are simply passed via signals to a GUI object to display. I wrote a complete example demonstrating that approach. It leads to some very concise and easy-to-understand code thanks to related code being adjacent.
If you do want to use explicit threads, it will be much easier not to derive from QThread, but to simply move various worker objects into their threads, and have them communicate via signals and slots. I have a complete example for that approach as well.
I need to make asynchronous HTTP call to my server in order to receive XML response.
After I get the response I will call a [previously specified] function if it is success or some other function if it's an error.
So what I thought about in the first place was coroutines. Unfortunately, after I make the http.get call I cannot yield, as it will wait for the whole thing to finish. I know I can use separate functions to read the response, however I have to wait at least for the first bytes of data in order for this function to be triggered which would allow me to yield. Anyway, for what I wan to do using coroutines doesn't look like the way to go.
Then I've tried calling a C function from lua, creating separate thread to get the XML and then call a function in Lua, however this doesn't work because of lua_state changing after a new thread is created. Before the thread is created I can see 3 parameters on the stack, and after creation of the new thread [I am passing lua_State as the argument] it has only one. Anyway, from what I understand lua_State will be closed once the original cfunction call is finished, so I won't be able to call back.
Since I'm just starting with lua and I'm even less familiar with lua to c bindings I can only hope I'm making some stupid mistakes and it will be easy to solve. For now however I'm stuck with no idea on how to progress further.
The story behind this issue:
I'm porting my game from Cocos2D objective C framework to Cocos2d-X C++ framework. I want to use Lua bindings as I think I will fail to port it to C++. Anyway I want to do it in Lua.
So I've got a scene where someone accesses a list of inventory they have in the game. If the response is immediate they will basically see a window opened with list of inventory. However, if it takes a tad bit longer to get the data [connection issues, sever overload... whatever] screen will fade out and some animation indicating data transfer will be shown on screen. At least this is how it works on the objc version of the game and I want the same thing.
Is there something I have missed during my research, is it possible to do it?
BTW I have seen Lua socket asynchronous calls and it doesn't help me because it still waits for the beginning of the transfer before it will start another one.
Something like Luvit ?
Luvit is an attempt to do something crazy by taking nodeJS's awesome
architecture and dependencies and seeing how it fits in the Lua
language.
This project is still under heavy development, but it's showing
promise. In initial benchmarking with a hello world server, this is
between 2 and 4 times faster than nodeJS.
I was able to do it using https://github.com/Neopallium/lua-llthreads
This seems to work fine on both iOS and Android platforms.
I am trying to implement the Observer design pattern with wxPython.
I have a modelling application that computes vast amount of data in the background. Sometimes I would like to display the output of the model in the GUI---which is just a grid of squares of different colours. Other times I need to do the computation without displaying the GUI.
The advantage of the observer pattern is that you can plug in or not a GUI just by adding or removing one line of code, something like
self.observers.append(MyWxGui())
or similar.
Now, to do that I need my computation to run on one thread, and the wx GUI to run in a different one.
I tried doing this with wxPython but I always get a Fatal I/O error:
python: Fatal IO error 11 (Resource temporarily unavailable) on X server :0.0.
I read tutorials on multithreading in wxPython, such as http://wiki.wxpython.org/LongRunningTasks, but they all have the Mainloop() running in the main thread and than the long running task in a secondary thread, while I need it to be the other way round. This is because if I have the Mainloop() in the main thread, the program hangs waiting for some event from the GUI, instead of proceeding with the computation.
I also saw that I cannot manipulate Device contexts (DCs) such as ClientDC or PaintDC in a sub-thread, but I'm running the entire wx code inside the same thread.
Can the Mainloop() and all the wx GUI be run in its own thread that is not the main application's one?
Running wxPython 2.8.11.0 on Ubuntu 10.10 maverick.
If you read that wiki page, then you should know that you can communicate back to the wx thread using wx.CallAfter, wxCallLater or wx.PostEvent in a thread-safe manner. I have a simple tutorial here:
http://www.blog.pythonlibrary.org/2010/05/22/wxpython-and-threads/
Personally, I would use something like Pubsub + one of the threadsafe methods mentioned above to communicate with the wx MainLoop. The nice thing about Pubsub is that it can listen for messages and react to them appropriately. The example above actually shows one way to do just that. Hopefully that will help you. Otherwise, I highly recommend joining the wxPython mailing list and asking there: http://groups.google.com/group/wxpython-users/topics?pli=1