Can I hide the title bar of MPlayer in gnome?

Question

I'm on a 10.04 machine with MPlayer, version SVN-r1.0~rc3+svn20090426-4.4.3.

When you invoke MPlayer from the command line to show a file, it displays the file within a window. This bar has a title, "MPlayer".

How can I disable this bar, entirely? I don't want to remove the title only, but the complete window bar. It's probably not an MPlayer option, but rather something with the window toolkit?

Solution 1

If it's just for MPlayer you could use the -noborder argument.

mplayer -noborder my_video.ogg

As a more general option, if you're using Compiz (default), you can:

1. Install and launch the CompizConfig Settings Manager
2. Select the Window Decoration plugin and hit the "plus" sign next to "Decoration Windows".
3. Describe the type of window you do not want title bars on with an "And" relationship, and mark "Invert". For example:

Click "Add" and enjoy!

Solution 2

One can remove the border of all windows, it is however a little hacky. I described the process a bit at:

http://grumbel.blogspot.com/2011/06/forcing-fullscreen-in-linux-for-apps.html

And have some code floating around at:

https://github.com/Grumbel/fullscreen-tools

Using the code from the git repository you can do:

./windowtool.py --decorations 0 ACTIVE

Which will deactivate the border, using 1 instead of 0 will reactivate it. ACTIVE refers to the window that has currently the focus, you can also give the window id which you can obtain via:

wmctrl -l

PS: The code isn't pretty and the README in there is a bit out of date.

Solution 3

You can use the -title option:

mplayer -title ' ' file.avi

Solution 4

Here's how to remove the title bar, that should work with almost all window managers in X11 :

xprop -name 'My window name' -format _MOTIF_WM_HINTS 32i -set _MOTIF_WM_HINTS 2

where My window name is your window name.

You can specify the window id instead, with the -id option.

If you omit the -name option, you will have to select the window whose title bar you want removed, by clicking on it.

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Comments

[Admin]

Sorry, didn't catch that earlier — yes, I want to remove the complete window decoration, to more or less have a borderless video playing.

[Satchit Bhogle]

Does the first method work only for MPlayer, or only for .ogg files? It failed to work for a .avi file with Totem.

[Mantra]

Seems like option #1 does the trick already — I'll check tomorrow to be sure. Thanks for the great answer!

[Mantra]

Sorry, I wasn't being clear. I wanted to get rid of the border entirely (see Jacob's answer above).

[erjiang]

@SatchitBhogle The '-noborder' switch is an mplayer-specific feature.

[unhammer]

I removed any unrelated stuff and created a tiny script that simply toggles the titlebar of the active window, here: gist.github.com/1815146 (I bind it to super+r in xfce keyboard settings, works nicely for youtube popouts along with always-on-top)

[c0dehunter]

What if we want to do it with some other app - any straightforward way?