Miniplayer like Windows Media Player has

[Pcfreakske2000]

Hi all,


Happy New Year to everyone , first of all.

In Windows Media Player when you minimize the screen of the program you get a miniplayer so that you can still control the basic functions of the player.

I would like to see that be possible in VLC Media Player.


Also a compatibility with the Windows Live Messenger "What are you listening to" feature , would be nice as well.

[fkuehne]

Also a compatibility with the Windows Live Messenger "What are you listening to" feature , would be nice as well.

Already supported, check the preferences please. You can enable it in "Interface -> Control interface"

[handoffate]

Windows Media Player embeds the "Mini Player" in the Windows taskbar. This uses functionality that is specific to Windows. Since VLC is a cross-platform program, relying on functionality that is specific to one OS is not an option.

I don't think anything like this would be possible with a cross-platform program.

[fkuehne]

I don't think anything like this would be possible with a cross-platform program.

You're wrong there If someone got the time for this, it could surely be included within VLC. There is a fair number of platform specific code modules already.

[handoffate]

I don't think anything like this would be possible with a cross-platform program.

You're wrong there If someone got the time for this, it could surely be included within VLC.

Not really.

Capturing a minimise command and executing another program when something is minimised is highly system-specific. There is no way this can be coded to work on all platforms. How would you propose to do this in a desktop environment that doesn't even have a minimise command?

Similarly embedding an applet in the taskbar is first of all dependant on the desktop environment having a taskbar, which not all do, and even if the system has a taskbar it might not support the embedding of applets into it.

[fkuehne]

There are facilities to make code platform specific, thus windows or Mac only for example. The easiest example is the following:

Code: Select all

#if __APPLE__ /* your Mac OS X code here */ #else if __WIN32__ /* your Windows 95 or higher code here */ #else if __LINUX__ /* Linux variant here */ #else /* unsupported platform, keep as generic as you can be */ #endif

... but there are also modules which are completely targeted for a single platform.
You confuse cross-platform code (like VLC) with cross-platform binaries (like apps written in Java). VLC is compiled for each platform individually, so it contains a completely differently written GUI on Macs compared to the Windows port, for example. Therefore, adding such a windows-only feature is really unproblematic. We just need someone with the time to do it.

[handoffate]

While it would obviously be possible to write a completely different interface for each system with a completely different feature set, one of the main points about VLC is that it has the same features on all systems.

Creating features that bahave radically differently on different systems would detract from what VLC is, that is one crossplatform program, not a collection of different single-platform programs with different feature sets.

Since a lot of VLC users are running Linux, moving from a situation where Linux users can take advantage of the full functionality of VLC to one where Linux users are stuck with an inferior version with fundamental featured missing would be tragic loss.

[DJ]

This has been happening now for some time as as more programmers are available for any given environment. This is a time and manpower issue for all free open source software available as cross platform. MPlayer is another good example.

[fkuehne]

Linux users can take advantage of the full functionality of VLC

In fact, this situation doesn't exist anymore since the release of the windows port in 2001 and the Mac OSX port in 2002 (no offense intended)

There are various features such as parts of the wizards, transparent video output, the fullscreen controller, recording from external audio/video sources, which are only available to limited platforms. The one which this thread was originally about, would be just yet another one, but a quite useful one actually

[handoffate]

There are various features such as parts of the wizards, transparent video output, the fullscreen controller, recording from external audio/video sources, which are only available to limited platforms. The one which this thread was originally about, would be just yet another one, but a quite useful one actually

Do we really want there to be yet another way in which Linux users are neglected?

If there are ways in which the Linux version is inferior, we should be addressing these issues, not leaving the Linux version even further behind!

[DGMurdockIII]

this would be great to have

[CloudStalker]

Sorry to have to be the one to say this but it seems that this ain't going to happen.

[#6] Basic Controls / Mini Interface [Task Bar]
Will never be done because too tide with Windows Versions. But the taskbar icon can be improved for 0.9.0.

[DGMurdockIII]

i would like to see this as well