hacking x11 protocol

[Colin Guthrie]

Lucio Crusca wrote:
> Hello everybody,
> 
> I'm a newbie here. Here is my problem:
> My customer asked me to setup a linux system so that it loops some flash 
> movies all the time (commercials).
> Adobe has recently released a standalone flash player for linux 
> (http://download.macromedia.com/pub/flashplayer/updaters/9/flash_player_9_linux_dev.tar.gz). 
> Quite a dumb one to be honest (it doesn't even support a playlist). So I've 
> written a bash script that fires up the Adobe player once for each SWF file 
> in a given directory. Each SWF file is a fullscreen commercial ."Fullscreen" 
> is an attribute (or something like that) embedded in the SWF file.

FWIW, the flash player 9 final has now been released... I'm guessing the
_dev in the above name indicates you're using a slighly outdated version.

> The problem is that when my script opens a new instance of the player, the 
> player first displays its window for a fraction of a second and then goes 
> fullscreen. That's quite ugly to see between commercials.
> 
> Now the fu**ed Adobe player is closed source, non free and whatever, so I 
> can't patch it (besides, I could happen to lack the skills...). I was 
> wondering if it was possible to hack the X11 protocol with a local protocol 
> forwarder to force every window not to show its frame and to open up 
> fullscreen from scratch.
> 
> Can you point me in the right direction please? Or have you got better ideas 
> on how to solve the problem with something maybe already present in XOrg?

Devilspie may work, but could you also use some higher level tools to
create a SWF file that wraps up the others. I thought flash was able to
load other flash object etc. and perhaps you could do something that
works by essentially wrapping up 50 odd .swf files and then play them
one after the other then loop... that would avoid restarting all the time.

Another solution would be to embed them in a web browser and use custom
events and some javascript to flip to the next commercial when one finishes.

I think there will be a lot of ways to skin a cat here... so it may be
worth trying to think outside the box before hacking too much :)

Col.