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]>
DVD support stays optional per room: DVD_ENABLED decides whether the
button is built at all, and rooms without it poll nothing. Upgrades
append a commented DVD_ENABLED=false so the option is discoverable
without changing what those rooms already do.
The dock polls the drive with CDROM_DRIVE_STATUS, which is a status
query rather than a read, so it does not spin the disc up. A disc that
becomes ready announces itself once and brings the DVD logo up to full
strength; an empty or unplugged drive holds it back, the same gray
versus colour language the LIVE icon already uses. Nothing autoplays —
playback always needs a deliberate press.
Playback is VLC rather than mpv because mpv dropped DVD menu support,
and menus are the part that matters for a commercial disc. It goes
through classroom-window like everything else, so the player minimizes
and restores from the dock exactly as the browser does.
Pressing the button with no drive, no disc, or a disc still spinning up
gives a plain-language notification instead of failing silently.
Reading the drive needs group cdrom, which the postinst grants and the
OTA reboot activates. Commercial CSS discs additionally need libdvdcss,
which Debian cannot ship; classroom-dvd-css-setup bootstraps it from
contrib. That is deliberately not run from the postinst, which executes
while dpkg already holds the apt lock.
The optical helpers live in a shared module both the dock and
classroom-dvd import, and the dock imports it defensively: if it ever
goes missing the shell loses disc detection rather than failing to
start.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <[email protected]>
