The VideoLAN Forums

It would be very cool if vlc supported Toaster ( http://www.myplugins.info/toaster.htm ), my favorite winamp plugin. It pops up a nice opaque "toast" between tracks that shows the folder's album art, track name, and track length. Then it casually fades away.

There is no toaster plugin for VLC but we could do some things. Add a trac ticket.

Hmm, this "toaster" thing gives me an idea.

there is libnotify under unix, album art should be easy to add

there is libnotify under unix, album art should be easy to add

And growl for OS X. (but nothing that I'm aware of for Windows)

there must be a Microsoft API to use notifications, but not used at the moment.

if someone can find some documentation / examples ... patches are also welcome

Well.... if there is a Microsoft API (I'm certain there is), then that would open up a whole new world of VLC plugins. I'm surprised that VLC doesn't already support some sort of generic messages API already.

The Toaster plugin basically gets a message from VLC of the song title, song length, and its path. The path lets Toaster try to open the folder.jpg for the album (or use a generic folder.jpg or nothing when the folder.jpg doesn't exist).


Which reminds me that there's another handy winamp plugin that doesn't do anything visual with that same info, it just logs the entire music listening history to a file, which is kinda cool.

I don't like the idea of using Microsoft APIs. Anyway, since there is a systray Icon in Qt4 interface, that can't be difficult.

Microsoft API not even needed. To paraphrase the great book "Programming Windows (by Petzold), "Windows is just windows and messages." Any application can create system-wide messages, suchas "VLC_PLAY_MP3", "VLC_PAUSE_MP3", "VLC_RESUME_MP3", "VLC_STOP_MP3", etc., and the variables that go along with those actions, that plug-ins and other apps can intercept.

It would not be difficult for VLC to have its own plug-in spec, and I'm surprised it does not already.

VLC is a very good application that could be great.

this is cool i like you have my support