Linux equivalent to Direct draw

Question

As a c# programmer, I'm used to Microsoft, however, I'm really liking the linux side of things and Mono opens up that world to me a lot better (imo).

I have an app that may need some direct draw support in order to display active video, and I'm curious as to what the equivalent (and even better, what support does Mono provide) in linux?

What is "active video"? And what specific APIs are you currently using? (methods, etc.) — Kirk Woll, Mar 01 '13 at 02:49
I think the words you're looking for are a hardware abstraction layer + retained mode graphics. — JerKimball, Mar 01 '13 at 02:55

score 2 · Answer 1 · answered Mar 01 '13 at 03:12

2

OpenGL is equivalent to DirectDraw in Linux/BSD and Mac(and in Windows too).

answered Mar 01 '13 at 03:12

x2.

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score 1 · Answer 2 · answered Mar 01 '13 at 04:33

The short answer is no, there is no DirectX support/emulation planned for the Mono framework, or for Linux in general. The closest you can get at the moment is to use an emulation layer like Wine or Cedega to run a windows app within Linux... which is not necessarily a perfect solution in many cases.

The alternative is to use a cross-platform library that will function the same on multiple platforms. The C# SDL project will apparently run on Mono, which should give you a consistent interface for graphical operations. It's based on libsdl which is fairly mature, and there are plenty of examples out there.

Linux equivalent to Direct draw

2 Answers2