As with gnome-control-center's bug #383066 and gnome-power-manager's bug #400844, Totem should have a fancy composited window when a media key is pressed (e.g. pause, next, previous, etc.).

As discussed in bug #383066, it's probably best to use large themed icons, rather than draw the icons manually using Cairo (as gnome-control-center currently does), but I don't think we need to fall back to a normal window if compositing isn't available, since we don't currently display anything when a media key is pressed (and there's no pressing need to do so).

Example code is here: http://svn.gnome.org/viewcvs/gnome-control-center/trunk/gnome-settings-daemon/gsd-media-keys-window.c?view=markup and is pretty self-contained. It might be worth moving this code for drawing an OSD out into a common library such as libegg so that all applications use it consistently. I'll post on the mailing list about this.