GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 139930
Panels pop up on top of full screen video with multihead
Last modified: 2004-12-22 21:47:04 UTC
(I at one time reported this to the xine team, and they thought this was most probably a window manager issue; I wasn't sure if they reported it forward but I didn't find anything resembling this bug in the bugzilla, so here goes.) Metacity, in certain conditions, pops up the panels over a full screen video window (with xine and totem, totem also using xine-libs, but also with gst-player). This reduces the usability of these video applications. The conditions can be replicated as follows: 1. Use a multihead configuration (no Xinerama, though I'm not sure if that's a factor). 2. Start to play a video on one head with Totem, Xine or gst-player. Set the video to play at full screen (with the XVideo extension). 3. Focus some window on the other head. The panels immediately pop up over the video. This hampers the ADD users' ability to watch a video on one head while doing other stuff on the other head, and would therefore be nice to have fixed. Curiously, with mplayer doing the playing this doesn't occur, but neither does it occur with xine/totem when using sawfish.
This is actually the expected behavior; the idea is that with Alt-tab/Alt-Esc you can launch a terminal or the system monitor to kill a hung full screen window. So me make is so the full screen window is above the panels only if it or its transient descendants have focus.
Ah, I see, fair enough. Seems to me though that this behaviour is still mostly useful with single-head displays, since with multihead one can kill a misbehaving full-screen app from the other screen. Would it be too ugly in your opinion to have this particular feature be dependent on how many screens there are in use? Oh, and if this is in fact the intended behaviour, then it's buggy wrt. mplayer, as said ;)
I agree its suboptimal with multihead, though I don't really know of a solution. It's not as simple as "if there's more than one screen don't do it" since your fullscreen app could be covering your only panel. You'd be able to get a terminal from the nautilus context menu but I don't think that a terminal should be the only way out. Not to mention if you have more than one fullscreen window...
Points well taken. Would it be difficult to alter the functionality so that a full screen window would be above panels only if it or its transient descendants _or_ anything on some other head has focus? This would work exactly the same as now on single head systems and would take care of the multihead case. Is there a downside that I haven't considered? (Hmm, might be a bit bothersome for Xinerama, since you'd have to keep track of window coordinates and whether they are completely clear of the fullscreen window, but should be easier for traditional X multihead.)
Havoc has a patch for this in bug 156511. *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 156511 ***