Yaron

TComboBox is a wrapper for a WinAPI component. When you call ComboBox.Items.Add, it triggers a WinAPI SendMessage call, which is very very slow (relative to a standard TStringList.Add), I wrote about it here if you're interested: https://www.reddit.com/r/ZoomPlayer/comments/1iu0lm3/low_level_code_optimization_or_how_i_made_zoom/

This doesn't solve the performance issue. TComboBox is inherently slow because it uses SendMessage for every item you add.

I'm using a layered window to do a transparent UI effect over video, but as far as I know, you can't do the glass effect in hardware using standard WinAPI, I believe you have to use the composition API for that (is it still considered WinAPI?). If no video in the background then it's simple enough to use GDI+ to create an anti-aliased round rectangle (I have pure pascal code to do it, but it's slower), Gaussian blur copy from the background image on paint, etc. You'd also have to intercept the hittest message to allow resizing/moving of a borderless window.

I designed an open-source (MIT license) TComboBox replacement that's not based on WinAPI: https://github.com/bLightZP/ZPComboBox My software (Zoom Player) uses a similar options dialog design to your own and using this component cut the form's create -> show time in half. P.S. I see you're using TTreeView, if you're restoring the last TreeView selected item when the form opens incorrectly, it can incur ~700ms penalty, something worth checking out.

You can do this using DirectShow, but as far as I know, there is no DirectShow filter (component) that can load from a TStream, you would have to write one yourself or use an AI to write one for you. I believe there are sources for the "File Source Async" DirectShow filter, you can use that as a base, replacing the disk IO with TStream commands. But it will be much easier to write the stream to a file in a temp folder and then play it.

Beyond what you're already using, there is a slight speedup trick of setting the TComboBox's style to "csSimple" when adding the items and then restoring the style afterwards. And since you're inserting the same data into the controls, might be slightly faster to do it only once, keep a pointer to the first object and then just do Assign on the items. But I'm afraid the speed difference between adding items to a TStringList compared to a TComboBox is ridiculous and it might just be better to write a replacement component (which I'm currently investigating).

I am designing a new media player UI and have been documenting my work, posting about programming and UI design in laymen terms on reddit. Recently, I posted about basic UI code optimization logic and thought it may be interesting for novice programmers. Since the post is simplified for non-programmers, I'll share here that I'm using WinAPI's layered windows and GDI+ to render the anti-aliased text and bar-shapes, preserving the alpha channel.

As part of a new feature I'm working on, I wrote functions to browse and get streaming URLs for the Top-3 popular media servers (Plex, Emby and Jellyfin) through an easy to use abstraction layer. I open-sourced the code here: https://github.com/bLightZP/Zoom-Player-emby-jellyfin-client-plugin/tree/main

My media player is using a skinned window with no title and is written in Delphi 7. I am not sure if it's the Delphi 7 or the skinned form, but Window's snap to zone when dragging the window to the edge of the screen doesn't trigger automatically. Does anyone know if there is a manual way to trigger it (cause the transparent overlay showing the new layout while dragging the window to appear)?

Yes, I'm aware, but Delphi is so slow under android that I wrote most of the UI code myself using bitmaps (and optimized the bitmap code too).

I previously discussed the issue of not being able to upgrade my app to support the latest Android SDK because I haven't been making enough money on Android development to justify upgrading Delphi beyond v10.3. My app is very simple, so I was thinking I may find a "compilation" partner that would just compile the source code for me on the latest version of Delphi. Does that pose any licensing issues? I mean you're not expected to just develop for yourself, right?

So my only option to develop an Android app for free is to abandon Pascal as a language?

How practical would it be to try converting my app to a Lazarus project?

I require some advice from the sages of this forum, In 2019 I wanted to learn cross-platform development so I purchased the latest version of Delphi at the time and I wrote an companion Android app for my main Windows based software. The Android app did not justify paying continued version renewals (making less than $400/year) so I stopped updating to new versions of Delphi, stopping at v10.3. Even though my Android application is very basic, I don't think I can submit an app created in Delphi 10.3 to the google play store due to the old SDK version Google no longer accepts. My question is, what is be the best path forward to allow me to submit new versions of the app to the google play store? Use the community version? Rewrite the app in a free alternative to Delphi (any recommendations)? Something else I haven't considered?

From what you're writing, it seems that I'm in more of a mess than I initially considered. Most of the strings I use are WideString in order to support Unicode text in Delphi 7, not only that, all of my base visual components are based on the TNT Unicode library (e.g. TTNTForm, TTNTListBox, TTNTStringList, etc), so I can't even load the project without getting lots of error messages and I'm not even sure if the TNT Unicode library is compatible with Delphi 10.3, which means I have to revert 1000's of work-arounds for unicode text that I've implemented over the years. My code also uses quite a bit of ASM optimized code for Audio DSP, graphic processing, etc.