Applications using KURT
XAnim:
To illustrate the effectiveness of KURT in supporting
multimedia applications, we have modified XAnim. XAnim is a program
for playing a wide variety of animation, video and audio formats
under X11. XAnim has been modified to use the KU Real-Time Linux
API to achieve better performance. Apart from the standard
options, XAnim takes two more command line flags to support
KURT. You can run XAnim as follows:
xanim -rt <period> <proc_requirements> -Xpid <pid of XServer> <animation_filename>
Where
- period is the frame rate that you want the
animation to be displayed with.
- proc_requirements is the time it takes for
XAnim to process one frame for that animation. This can be
observed using XAnim without specifying the -rt
flag. Running XAnim without the -rt flag, causes XAnim to
run without using KURT. The time it takes for processing
each frame is displayed on the screen.
- Xpid: If the -rt flag is specified, then
the PID of the XServer should also be specified using the
-Xpid flag. This allows the modified XAnim to set the
priority of the XServer to MAX_KURT_PRIORITY.
The effect of KURT scheduling can be observed by running two
copies of XAnim. One with the -rt flag specified and one without
it. It can be observed that as the background load increases
(just type find / in another shell) the copy of XAnim that is run
without the -rt flag will suffer considerable degradation in terms
of video quality.
It should be noted that the modified XAnim has been tested only in
the absence of Audio. Also, since I am not very knowledgeable
about multimedia, the modifications are more of a hack into the
source and can definitely be improved. But hey, this is just a
proof of concept.
Download Instructions
The modified XAnim can be either
downloaded as a gzipped ELF executable or
as a patch to XAnim-2.70.6.2.
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank Mark Podlipec for writing XAnim and
putting it in the public domain.
Bug-reports and Suggestions
Please send all bug-reports/questions/suggestions to kurt@ittc.ku.edu.
Comments are welcome on how we can improve this system and this
document. You can also subscribe to the KURT mailing list by
sending a mail to majordomo@ittc.ku.edu
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KURT @ ITTC
Last modified: Fri Mar 24 13:05:00 CST 2000
