[MPlayer-users] feature request - decode video but don't render to a window

[Adam Nielsen]

> Since that option writes video images (XImages) to shared
> memory, it seems to me that mplayer, in this case, doesn't need to (or
> shouldn't) render to a window, yet it does. The source file vo_x11.c,
> line 374 calls vo_x11_create_vo_window(), which creates a window
> (surprise). That window is used to render video.
> 
> Why?

Because -vo x11 doesn't mean "output to shared memory", it means "output to an 
X11 window".  Shared memory is just the method used to get the video into the 
window.

> It would be useful to me to have a way to specify options so that it did
> not create or use a display window (unless that capability already
> exists and I missed it)

You would probably need to write a new output plugin that didn't actually 
output video to the screen to do this.  Have you looked at mencoder?  It might 
be possible to output to some raw/simple format, put that on a pipe, then the 
decoded data will be available to your application.

Of course if all you need is to draw the controls on top of the video, it'd be 
much easier if you could use hardware that supported -vo xv.  Then you could 
just create a window on top of the mplayer window, set its background colour 
to the right colour-key, then your controls would be visible on top of the 
window.  You could probably even do that with any output method if your 
controls were square and didn't need any transparent areas where the video 
shows through.

Cheers,
Adam.