Cinder: How to get a pointer to data\frame generated but never shown on screen?

Question

There is that grate lib I want to use called libCinder, I looked thru its docs but do not get if it is possible and how to render something with out showing it first?

Say we want to create a simple random color 640x480 canvas with 3 red white blue circles on it, and get RGB\HSL\any char * to raw image data out of it with out ever showing any windows to user. (say we have console application project type). I want to use such feaure for server side live video stream generation and for video streaming I would prefer to use ffmpeg so that is why I want a pointer to some RGB\HSV or what ever buffer with actuall image data. How to do such thing with libCInder?

Answer 1

You will have to use off-screen rendering. libcinder seems to be just a wrapper for OpenGL, as far as graphics go, so you can use OpenGL code to achieve this.

Since OpenGL does not have a native mechanism for off-screen rendering, you'll have to use an extension. A tutorial for using such an extension, called Framebuffer Rendering, can be found here. You will have to modify renderer.cpp to use this extension's commands.

An alternative to using such an extension is to use Mesa 3D, which is an open-source implementation of OpenGL. Mesa has a software rendering engine which allows it to render into memory without using a video card. This means you don't need a video card, but on the other hand the rendering might be slow. Mesa has an example of rendering to a memory buffer at src/osdemos/ in the Demos zip file. This solution will probably require you to write a complete Renderer class, similar to Renderer2d and RendererGl which will use Mesa's intrusctions instead of Windows's or Mac's.