Koda

I did a little more exploration of compiz this afternoon, and have a few updates to share.

For starters, I stumbled upon the Gentoo Wiki XGL Howto, with a surprising amount of information regarding it. A few things to be gleaned:

Thing 1:
Mplayer can be run at reasonable speeds when the arguments -zoom -vo x11 are added to it. I’m really not sure why this works; I only know that on my system, it does. Intuitively, I would think that using the x11 driver would work worse, as it is supposed to be without acceleration, but it sure performs better than the broken xv support.

Thing 2:
The wiki mentions a neat little util called transset, which lets you set window transparency on the fly. apt-get install transset, run it with a decimal opacity between 0 and 1, and click on a window. Fun! Be careful though, don’t run it with transset --help like I did, or it will totally dissapear your window. Gee, um, not the greatest software design.

So, the logical conclusion from this, is that to have a really good time, you must make a bunch of semi-transparent mplayer windows and throw them around. Well, it worked for me.

I’ve updated the Howto with most of these goodies.

Finally, for some annoying reason, Google does not seem to be crawling this blog very well. Thus, if you came here looking for a Howto, and found a whole bunch of other silly things instead, it can be found here.