I think you asked this before, and I mentioned Tk or Tk::Zinc will do the job. Another possibilty now is the Gtk2::DrawingArea, which is more similar to SDL than a canvas. The Gtk2::DrawingArea can use Pango and Cairo to make exotic looking drawings. You need to use a little hack with a DrawingArea however, to maintain persistence of image, but you can glean that technique from the various demos. See Drawing with Perl/Gtk2 If you go with Gtk2, you can then incorporate Gtk2::Streamer (which is the general purpose high-quality actively developed multi-purpose player for Gtk2). However, I found that SDL::Audio was easier to understand than Gtk2::Streamer.

P.S. The newest promise on the horizon is Papyrus but there is no Perl port yet.