Is this possible with skinning?

[DaveMt19]

I am very new to skinning, so please excuse this very basic question.

I like the VLC player, but I find its interface clunky. I would like an interface that is:

1. Minimalistic - uses the least possible screen space for controls, and saves the rest for the actual movie.

2. Specific for Movie Mode - removes controls not much used for watching movies, such as playlist, play random, etc. but includes those for watching movies, such as different speeds of fast forward and back, frame advance, snapshots, etc.

Based on these considerations, I made a mockup of what I'd like to see:



This is somewhat like the regular Windows Media Player. The key features are:

1. All the controls disappear after 5 seconds if you don't move the mouse in the player window. Moving the mouse brings the controls back. This is a great savings of screen space, because you don't permanently have a controls window below the picture window, but the controls are still there and instantly accessible when you need them.

2. Only the most commonly used controls are included: a stop button, a single button that toggles between play and pause, forward and reverse buttons controlled by a speed button (which toggles between different forward and reverse speeds available), frame advance and frame rewind buttons, two loop buttons to set start/end for looping, a snapshot button. Also included are two scroll bars for volume and for scrubbing through the whole video. Two other buttons are for fullscreen and to bring up other control windows.

3. There is a VLC Player menu item at the top, much like the Firefox button in the Firefox Browser, which has menus for various VLC settings.

I guess there are many variations possible with this sort of layout, and no doubt other people can improve on it much more so than I have put together in a few minutes. But the key features are the disappearing controls (which allow us to maximize space in the VLC window for video only), and the aggregation of video-playback controls (such as frame advance, snapshot, etc.) with the main controls (play, pause, etc.) so they only take up one line of screen space instead of two as at present.

So my question is, does a skin like this exist? Is it even possible with skinning or would it require a more radical change to VLC?

[erwan10]

Using the skins2 interface with the latest vlc1.2 version, this can be achieved only in fullscreen mode, but not on a regular window.

The fullscreen controller (a dedicated skinned window) can now be easily positioned (In your case, centered at the bottom of the screen) and transparency can even be activated if the OS/Window manager supports it. It disappears after a few seconds (fading out if transparency is supported) and it reappears on mouse move. All features that you mention are supported.

With a regular window, there is no such support yet. You cannot just override a video control with additional controls. Those latter controls won't show up at run time. This is a skins2 limitation.