Python pixel manipulation library

Question

So I'm going through the beginning stages of producing a game in Python, and I'm looking for a library that is able to manipulate pixels and blit them relatively fast.

My first thought was pygame, as it deals in pure 2D surfaces, but it only allows pixel access through pygame.get_at(), pygame.set_at() and pygame.get_buffer(), all of which lock the surface each time they're called, making them slow to use. I can also use the PixelArray and surfarray classes, but they are locked for the duration of their lifetimes, and the only way to blit them to a surface is to either copy the pixels to a new surface, or use surfarray.blit_array, which requires creating a subsurface of the screen and blitting it to that, if the array is smaller than the screen (if it's bigger I can just use a slice of the array, which is no problem).

I don't have much experience with PyOpenGL or Pyglet, but I'm wondering if there is a faster library for doing pixel manipulation in, or if there is a faster method, in Pygame, for doing pixel manupilation. I did some work with SDL and OpenGL in C, and I do like the idea of adding vertex/fragment shaders to my program.

My program will chiefly be dealing in loading images and writing/reading to/from surfaces.

Answer 1

Have you tried the Python Imaging Library? You'd still have to communicate the data back to pygame via frombuffer or somesuch to do the blitting, but the PIL can handle the pixel access.

Answer 2

I checked out pyglet, and saw that it works well for static per pixel collision, when the image is not manipulated too much; however, I'm not sure how well it works with a dynamic image.

In short, I'm looking for a library that's able to quickly display a buffer of pixels. This buffer will be constantly changing, so fast access and blitting is essential. This could be done in C with relative ease using SDL; however, I'm looking for a similar method in Python. I'm not even too worried about hardware acceleration at this point, although it would certainly be nice.