Render on top of mplayer using custom window

mplayer can easily be instructed to render on a custom window with the -wid (window handle) parameter.

// On windows
long targetWindowId = reinterpret_cast<long>(canvas->GetHWND());

// On Linux
long targetWindowId = GDK_WINDOW_XWINDOW(canvas->GetHandle()->window);

Now that I got it to render on my canvas, I cannot render on top of it without flickering, because I cannot do double buffering. (I cannot control when mplayer renders frames on the window). That's why I add a second window that reads the first window to a bitmap, I can do whatever I want to that bitmap, and display it . This meant that I could no longer use my preferred video renderer on windows -vo direct3d because somehow that setting doesn't actually draw on the window, just in the same region. When reading the first window I'd get an empty bitmap and not the video. I ended up using -vo directx:noaccel in order to properly read it.

Fix overlap problem

This posed another problem, when hovering the second window on top of the first, it interferes with the video as it renders itself in window1 first. I only encountered this on my windows pc:

I decided to ignore this problem and try to find a way to hide the first window so that it wouldn't interfere. I tried minimizing it, Hide(), move it outside the screen, etc. But mplayer would not render the video in these cases. I then tried making the window 100% transparent and this worked. It also fixed my overlap-problem as I could now overlap the windows without problems. Somehow making the windows transparent forces the no-hardware-acceleration-directx renderer to behave differently. Making the window 1% transparent also fixes the overlap-problem.

Fix linux support

On Linux I use the -vo X11 video output, and overlap wasn't a problem. The only annoying thing is that in order to get the GTK window handle you have to include a GTK header in C++, which requires adding a lot of include directories to your include path. Because you need to cast the window handle to a GTKWidget instance, and ask it for the xid.

Result

The code is available on bitbucket and works on Windows (tested Windows vista with aero theme) and Linux (openSUSE 11.4). Makefile and Visual studio project files included.

Where I used this for..

All texts and images are rendered on top of the background video.