Xfce Forum

livesliders

Member

Registered: 2013-10-30

Posts: 5

xfce4 as digital signage

I'm working a project to use xfce4 as the window manager for digital signage.
Everything is great except one little bit that I cannot get to work.

I can get video to work as a background (compositor off), but not PNG transparency as an overly (compositor off).

On the other hand, I can get PNG transparency as on overlay to work (compositor on), but cannot get video to display as a background (compositor on).

When compositor is on, video always covers every open window, in my case, the PNG images as overlays.
I've even tried xwinwrap but agian, with compositor on, video covers all other open windows.

So my only needs are (with or without compositor):
- Video as a background (preferrably the root X window.
- PNG transparency.

If this is not do-able, then perhaps a way to bash script something like "set window X to background (mplayer fullscreen), and window Y to foreground (PNGs using pqiv image player)".

Any help or direction is very appreciated.
Matt

livesliders

Member

Registered: 2013-10-30

Posts: 5

Re: xfce4 as digital signage

ok. almost there. I used the example bash script provided by aktiv on this thread.. http://forum.xfce.org/viewtopic.php?id=6762
It uses wmctrl to get the window ID and then set some properties on the window identified by the ID. Im my case i set add,below.

This works great for setting the order of windows. However, wmctrl -l doesn't seem to get the window ID of a fullscreen video when using mplayer -fs $filename
-fs tells mplayer to run fullscreen.

Is there no window ID for borderless windows? I'm a wm noob. Thanks

livesliders

Member

Registered: 2013-10-30

Posts: 5

Re: xfce4 as digital signage

Nevermind. It's working now. I was running things in the wrong order.
Ideally, would be great to set a video as "wallpaper" in xfce4 for digital signage setups. But wmctrl does the job and its good enough for the girls i go out with.