I was experimenting with trying to play videos in the desktop background so I can work on other things while passively watching videos that I really didn’t want to spend 100% of my concentration on. However when I tried to use mplayers -rootwin option under Ubuntu it did not show anything.<\/p>\n
After doing some Googling around, it seems that the problem is tied with how rich desktop environments like KDE and Gnome manage the ‘desktop’<\/a>. They normally override the traditional X11 root window with their own which means that sending output to rootwin won’t show anything.<\/p>\n However, luckily there are ways around this. One post<\/a> on the mplayer list mentioned ways to disable background handling by GNOME and KDE. However I could not get this working under Gnome. After some more Googling around I found that Lifehacker had a hint on how to enable screensavers in the background<\/a>. So using that information it was rather simple. The recipe for Ubuntu is:<\/p>\n \n# Tell GNOME to not handle the desktop I was experimenting with trying to play videos in the desktop background so I can work on other things while passively watching videos that I really didn’t want to spend 100% of my concentration on. However when I tried to use mplayers -rootwin option under Ubuntu it did not show anything. After doing some Googling […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":703,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1216,1101,1100],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-619","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fixes","category-geek","category-linux"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/hoanga\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/619","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/hoanga\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/hoanga\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/hoanga\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/703"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/hoanga\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=619"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/hoanga\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/619\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/hoanga\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=619"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/hoanga\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=619"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/hoanga\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=619"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\n$ gconftool-2 –type bool –set \/apps\/nautilus\/preferences\/show_desktop false
\n# Play a video file in the rootwin as fullscreen
\n$ mplayer -rootwin -fs my_cool_video.avi\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"