First skin & a few questions

[MMC]

Hey everyone. First post here. I recently found out that VLC was skinnable (I never knew!), so I made a simple skin for my purposes (using the VLC Skin Editor v0.8.5). I am probably not the typcal VLC user since I use it for local video playback only. I don't use the playlist or EQ functions so (for now) I have only skinned the main video window. I kept the interface extremely minimal, only a Play/Pause button and the time slider are visible. On the right side of the grey interface bar are two "hidden" buttons for taking a snapshot and accessing the VLC "Preferences" window. Moving your mouse over them makes the buttons appear. The empty area on the far right corner of the interface bar (to the right of the Preferences icon) is for resizing the player. Everything else is accessed by right-clicking an empty area of the interface bar to bring up the menu.

I do have a few questions though. I think the answers to all of them are "that isn't possible", but hopefully I'm wrong:
1) Can the resizing of the player be restricted to the aspect ratio of the video that is playing?
2) Can the default video screen be any color other than black (before a video is loaded)?
3) In "windowed" or "fullscreen" mode, is is possible to right-click the video screen to bring up the main menu (like VLC does with it's default interface)?
4) In fullscreen mode, is it possible to have overlayed video controls when using a skin (like VLC does with it's default interface)?

Thanks,

Matt

Here is a screenshot of my skin so far:

[3breadt]

1) no
2) no
3) Afaik the context menu is enabled for the video, also in fullscreen mode. Doesn't it work with you?
4) no

[MMC]

Thanks for the reply. Regarding 3), if I right-click the video screen I do not get a context menu. It doesn't matter VLC is in fullscreen mode or a regular window, and it didn't work with the three skins that I tried (mine, the default.vlt, and "dno_black" by Pixeez). I forgot to mention that I'm using VLC v0.9.9.

And I have one more question:
5) When I double-click a video file associated with VLC (in Windows Explorer), VLC will automatically start playing the video when it loads. When using a skin, the VLC program will load but the video will not automatically start playing. I have to hit the "Play" button manually. Not that big of a deal but is it possible to make a video start playing automatically when using skins?

Thanks again.

Matt

[erwan10]

points 3/ and 5/ were known bugs in vlc 0.9.X and have been corrected in vlc 1.0.

When using skins, I strongly advice you to use vlc1.0 (corrects a whole bunch of bugs)

Erwan10

[MMC]

I upgraded to v1.0.3 and problems 3) and 5) were fixed. Thanks!

Regarding 2), I found that by adding a "screen background" (my definition) image to my skin that was sized exactly the same as the video screen (480x272 in this case), and placing it under the video screen in the VLC Skin Editor's "Items" window, that the screen background image would be displayed whenever VLC was started and a video was not loaded, or after a video was stopped. When a video is playing or paused the video is shown instead of the screen background image. The image does scale as the screen is resized but that is to be expected. A solid color screen background image would eliminate the scaling problem. Work great!

Matt

Screenshot of the skin with a video that has been stopped: