The loading surface was invisible. GtkWindow only renders its own CSS
background when the application is not painting the window itself, and
this window was created app-paintable with no draw handler and no child
— so it drew nothing at all. The black area during loading was never it:
it was VLC's own window, tiled by sway into the usable area, which
excludes the strip the dock reserves. That is why the dock and the
wallpaper stayed on screen underneath.
An earlier headless check missed this because that sway had no wallpaper
configured, so an invisible surface and a black one looked identical.
Rechecked with the real wallpaper and the real dock underneath.
The surface now paints, and carries a spinner and "Loading DVD..." on
the same translucent rounded card as the dock. It moves from the top
layer to the overlay layer, because the dock is a top-layer surface and
DVD mode has to cover it rather than depend on which surface sway
created first. Its exclusive zone of -1 keeps sway from moving it out of
the way of the dock's reserved strip.
It goes up before VLC is started rather than alongside it, so no part of
VLC's window is ever seen against the wallpaper, and comes down only
once VLC reports playback on screen. The deadline that takes it down
regardless is now twenty seconds, since an optical drive can be slow,
and a failure to start VLC at all ends the session instead of leaving a
cover with nothing behind it.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <[email protected]>
Pressing DVD now enters DVD mode rather than opening VLC. VLC is still
the backend, because its dvdnav module is what decodes disc menus and
nothing else on Debian does that reliably, but nothing a person can see
or press belongs to it any more.
classroom-dvd-session owns the whole thing. It puts a full-screen black
layer-shell surface up the moment the button is pressed, starts VLC
behind it, and drops it once playback is actually on screen — so the
harsh cut from wallpaper to VLC's black window is gone, and no partial
VLC window or reserved dock strip is ever visible. A deadline drops the
surface regardless, because DVD mode must never leave a black screen
with nothing behind it.
The controls are a classroom bar on the overlay layer, the one layer
sway draws above a fullscreen window. It slides up when the pointer
reaches the bottom of the screen and hides again shortly after it
leaves. It is drawn from the dock's own stylesheet at the room's UI
scale, so it is the same surface, the same radius and the same white
icons. While hidden it only accepts the pointer in a thin strip along
the bottom edge, so a click on a disc menu goes to the disc.
The bar reaches VLC through an HTTP interface on loopback behind a
password generated per session, sending hotkey *actions* by name. That
is what makes the next part possible.
All 108 hotkeys VLC 3.0.23 defines are unset, then Space, Esc and the
arrow keys plus Enter are bound. Crop, aspect ratio, subtitles, audio
tracks and deinterlacing are no longer reachable by pressing a key at
random, and the arrow keys no longer change VLC's volume — the
television owns volume, and CEC will own it properly later.
Esc quits instead of leaving fullscreen. There is nothing to leave, and
leaving it was what stranded people on a black VLC window. Close, Eject
and Esc all ask VLC to quit and escalate to SIGTERM then SIGKILL if it
does not; when VLC exits by any route, including a crash, the session
ends and the classroom desktop comes back.
Verified against VLC 3.0.23 on Trixie: every argument accepted, every
control action accepted over the control interface, a wrong password
refused, and quit exiting cleanly. The surfaces were rendered under a
headless sway and screenshotted to check the bar against the dock.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <[email protected]>
Stock VLC looks like a desktop media player, which is wrong for a room
where the TV is the whole interface. VLC stays the backend because its
dvdnav module is what provides the disc menus, and menus are the part
that matters on a commercial disc.
It is dressed down with documented VLC 3.x options, all verified against
the 3.0.23 build in Debian Trixie: minimal view, dark palette, no cone,
no tray, no now-playing popups, no resume prompt, no recent-disc
history, no title banner. sway draws no border on the window either, so
there is nothing above the video.
The auto-hiding fullscreen controller is deliberately kept: it is not
persistent chrome, and it is the only way a volunteer with a mouse can
pause or change chapter.
No skin is involved. Skins replace the interface wholesale and take the
keyboard and mouse handling that DVD menu navigation depends on with
them, as would --intf dummy.
Also drops --no-qt-updates-notif, which was not an option in Debian's
VLC at all. It made VLC exit before it started, so the DVD button could
never have launched a disc.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <[email protected]>
The checklist covers the bottom-shell regression explicitly, since that
is the part most likely to be broken by a later change, and records the
known limitation that Chrome's own minimize button does nothing under
sway.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <[email protected]>
