The VideoLAN Forums

I am currently using VLC 2.2.0-rc2 Weatherwax on Debian Jessie with Gnome 3.14.1.

When using custom skins on VLC (any of them), the top bar (from the Gnome Shell) is still visible when in full screen. The only way that I have found to get rid of the top bar is to switch VLC back to 'native style' in preferences.

Does anyone have any suggestions, because I really would like to use a custom skin.

The short answer would be to file a bug report (with thorough description of the Window Manager brand and version as you did here)

The long answer is that, from an application perspective in a X11 environment, requesting full screen is done via the ICCCM standard. And, in last resort, the Window Manager (Gnome shell, Unity, KWin, Mate, Cinnamon, xfce, .... they are galore) is the one to eventually decide what to do or not to do with this request. Some Window Managers just accept the full screen request without any restrictions. Others put extra (often undocumented and definitely not described in the ICCCM standard) restrictions to what type of window is eligible for full screen, or whether some other part of the shell should still be displayed on top or what the useful surface of fullscreen should be. So the only thing to do is to find out what specific requirements this particular Gnome shell 3.14.1 expect for a full untainted fullscreen and code it ! When using the default vlc based on the Qt library, this usually works fine, because the underlying Qt library does provide these extra properties for most Window Managers.

A fix has just been applied that fixes the issue described in this thread (tested successfully with Unity and Gnome3)

This fix will be available in the next version of the 2.2 branch.