Problem: When I start a VNC session and play a movie, e.g. an mp4 in SMPlayer or VLC, I can see through the video at the desktop (whether that is a picture or solid color), and consequently the movie gets a faded-out look.
If the same movie is played in Firefox, the video is normal.
When I used to use Gnome Ubuntu, the video was normal in SMPlayer and VLC (as well as Firefox).
My Xfce Manjaro uses ~/.vnc/config for config and with these simple contents:
What can I do to my Xfce Manjaro so video plays normal in any app?
If that’s not possible, should I install Gnome to it and try to replicate what I had with Gnome Ubuntu?
Or if that’s not advisable, am I reduced to having to build a Gnome Ubuntu? (These are all virtual machines, and there is no cost except in the form of my time.)
On my use case: I don’t regularly watch movies via VNC. I have some messengers that I don’t want to be looking at constantly, and so they are banished into a virtual machine in a computer in another room. I go in it once in a while and find that somebody has sent me a movie clip. I don’t want to have to download the thing and SMB into the same VM to watch the clip. I just want it to play in VNC. It’ll be something short and probably stupid.
And it worked! The overall VNC experience is exactly the same as before except that movies play normal in all apps and, of course, I lost my geometry from config.
Sometimes faith works.
Now if I could only work that geometry back into xstartup or elsewhere.
ADDING LATER
Movies play normal in VLC. In SMPlayer, at least video is not see-through but may stop in a few seconds (this happened in only one VNC session among many, was maybe just a fluke).
Also, xstartup can have just these contents, as modified from that provided by linux-aarhus (see below):
In sum, the solution is to move the choice of xfce from config to xstartup.
Why the computer would ever think I’d want washed-out looking video is beyond me. (“Oh, you want normal looking video? Why didn’t you say so in xstartup? Only those who like washed-out video use config.”)
I think you should bring that config file back, at least according to the wiki:
Create ~/.vnc/config and at a minimum, define the type of session desired with a line like session=foo where foo corresponds to whichever desktop environment is to run.
Linux shell scripting is a very powerful tool which I had a hard time learning and I am still a padawan.
The script you found uses conditions to decide if a certain part should be executed.
The first two commands unset named environment variables.
The third starts an xfce4 session - but because you have not added the continuation marker - the script will stop execution until the xfce4 session ends - then it will continue with the remaining commands
exec is a keyword which turns over control to the command - which in turn will stop execution of the script.
Ohhh, so THAT’S why there is a trailing & for it, to not “stop”? I was reading the script and understood that it first checked if the file was executable, but then I could not figure out why the script executed itself. It then checks that .Xresources is readable and if so runs xrdb… That is pretty darn clever.
Pretty sure that is a debian thing since he got the script from a debian based instruction page.
I was curios about that too - and it turns out the script is a symlink to /etc/alternatives/x-window-manager which in turn is a symlink to /usr/bin/gnome-session script which in turn launches the gnome-session-binary with the supplied arguments - that is at least the case with Ubuntu 18.04.
The final destination script
#!/bin/sh
if [ "x$XDG_SESSION_TYPE" = "xwayland" ] &&
[ "x$XDG_SESSION_CLASS" != "xgreeter" ] &&
[ -n "$SHELL" ] &&
grep -q "$SHELL" /etc/shells &&
! (echo "$SHELL" | grep -q "false") &&
! (echo "$SHELL" | grep -q "nologin"); then
if [ "$1" != '-l' ]; then
exec bash -c "exec -l '$SHELL' -c '$0 -l $*'"
else
shift
fi
fi
#SETTING=$(gsettings get org.gnome.system.locale region)
#REGION=${SETTING#\'}
#REGION=${REGION%\'}
if [ -n "$REGION" ]; then
export LC_TIME=$REGION
export LC_NUMERIC=$REGION
export LC_MONETARY=$REGION
export LC_MEASUREMENT=$REGION
export LC_PAPER=$REGION
fi
exec /usr/lib/gnome-session/gnome-session-binary "$@"
@jamjar I guess we have found another place where you can define the LC_COLLATE we figured out in your other thread. xD
Edit
For clarification, I AM JOKING (but also not, because it probably WOULD work to set it here), do not do that, the LC_COLLATE we set in /etc/locale.conf should stay there…
IMHO, if it works, why look for problems that doesn’t really exist.
I would try to follow the arch wiki and see if I could get another way working that is done for ARCH and not debian.
Use xfce if you got that working, otherwise try to use the desktop environment you actually installed to begin with (if it wasnt xfce).
You find, as described in the wiki, what environments you have available by running ls /usr/share/xsessions/. For me it produces plasma.desktop witch means I set it to run in plasma.
Play around with it, don’t be afraid, just make sure you make backups of the files you change so you can revert.
But again, if it works, and you are not a masochistic person like me wanting to understand and control EVERYTHING ignoring all the headaches that brings, why mess with it?
Yes, I am happy enough for now. But it would be nice if somebody could tell me which line in xstartup is giving me normal video or even why I didn’t have it in the first place.
That’s a ‘defenition’.
If it breaks trying to change things, taking hours, maybe days to figure out, just to get it to work ‘better’, is that really ‘better’.
I absolutely see your point and I’m EXACTLY the same, but we have to establish what kind of person you are before knowing if that would render satisfaction rather than frustration on the WAY to a NEW solution.
Same argument goes here. But again, yes, for MY personality this fits. I’m also stubborn AF…
In case you have not seen replies after your own last, could you tell me which line in my Debian-born xstartup is doing the actual work (giving me normal video) and which lines I could therefore delete as extraneous? In short, what should a version of xstartup look like that has shed unneeded elements? Thanks.
