[vlc-devel] [PATCH] Optional pause when window inactive.

[Rémi Denis-Courmont]

Le mercredi 14 septembre 2011 09:02:52 sanjeev mk, vous avez écrit :
> Starting a new thread because this is a different patch and the previous
> thread had become pretty long.
> 
> As discussed previously in the thread "Pause when window inactive", one of
> the users suggested the idea of having the 'Pause when window inactive'
> feature as a Preference option, if there are significant number of users
> who want it.

Im my opinion, this idea is plain idiotic.

For a start, the video being played back may be a music video. In that case it 
is perfectly reasonable to continue playing audio even if focus is lost. 
Similarly, VLC may loose the focus to a small application that does not 
obscure the video, or only a small part of it, e.g. live messaging. Again, I 
would not expect the video to pause for this.

And last, we cannot track the visibility of the video window: compositing 
managers have drastically altered the meaning of visiblity. Essentially, 
visibility is only meant to tell the application that it does not need to 
refresh its window (VLC already partially implements this optimization).

So, it comes down to the user pausing the video when changing task. That seems 
perfectly reasonable, and I don't want to clutter the code with yet another 
useless obscure and disabled by default configuration option.

Pause should only trigger automatically as a consequence of an event that is 
NOT triggered by the user. If the user triggered the event, we can assume the 
user would have paused the video manually. By that, I mean things like 
incoming VoIP calls. In that case, playback should be paused automatically 
even if it is audio only. And handling that probably does not belong in the 
VLC UI code.

-- 
Rémi Denis-Courmont
http://www.remlab.net/
http://fi.linkedin.com/in/remidenis