How do I make xscreensaver play a video clip?
To play MPEG videos: First you need an MPEG player that can render to the root window. You can find one (called mpeg2dec_onroot) included with the Electric Sheep screen saver module. To use it, put a line like this in the `programs’ preference in your .xscreensaver file: “My Movie” mpeg2dec_onroot $HOME/movies/my_movie.mpg \n\ To play Flash animations: Macromedia’s stand-alone Flash player has xscreensaver support, as of version 6.0.79 and later. To use it, put a line like this in the `programs’ preference in your .xscreensaver file: “My Flash” gflashplayer -root $HOME/movies/my_flash.swf \n\ To play QuickTime, AVI, RealVideo, or dynamic HTML animations: As far as I know, there is no software to do any of this that works with xscreensaver. If you know of any, please let me know.
To play MP4, MPEG, QuickTime, FLV and AVI videos: Install MPlayer 1.0 or newer, and add something like the following to the `programs’ preference in your .xscreensaver file: “My Movie” mplayer -really-quiet -nosound -nolirc \ -nostop-xscreensaver \ -wid $XSCREENSAVER_WINDOW \ -fs -loop 0 \ $HOME/movies/my_movie.mp4 \n\ Duplicate those lines for each other movie you would like to play. It’s also possible to encapsulate the above into a single shell script which would pick a movie file at random from a directory and play that. Several people have written such things; Google it. To play SWF Flash animations: Macromedia’s stand-alone Flash player has xscreensaver support, as of version 6.0.79 and later. To use it, put a line like this in the `programs’ preference in your .xscreensaver file: “My Flash” gflashplayer -root $HOME/movies/my_flash.swf \n\ To play anything else: Beats me.
