Plugin in top of video (VideoPlugin) Question

[fla]

I've been playing with McbainUK's Volume OSD plugin and am pretty happy with it except for one thing. I'd like to avoid the [up to] one second delay that it takes for the plugin to appear.

I've considered being "always on" and rendering transparent until the volume changed but I too considered this misbehaved.

I've found that the volume osd can appear "instantly" if the keyboard shortcut 5 F11 is sent by my remote software following volume changes (my volume plugin is VideoPlugin5). This is abusive use of the "activate plugin" shortcut and also sometimes switches to channel 5.

Is there any way the plugin can receive keyboard events even while it is deactivated? If not, could a "two plugin in one" strategy be used? A parallel plugin would always spy on the keyboard events but do nothing. When a +/- (volume change) keypress was noticed, and the volume plugin was not currently active, it would push 5 F11 keyboard events.

Ideally the IVideoPlugin api could be told that needsToBeShown() should be called on keyboard events. Something like usesKeyboardActivation(true).

Any suggestions, pointers would be greatly appreciated.

[fla]

Any suggestions on avoiding the 1 second delay for a video plugin? Wild guesses? Any vague idea of a solution would be great. Thanks.

[sub]

The delay could be up to a second, which is how often it is polled. There isnt currently anyway to avoid this. I'll see if I can add a mechanism in future to help with this.

[Snarky]

Have you tried sending keypresses other than F11+5? (Sounds like you have, but just wanted to make sure.) I wonder if any keypress will trigger immediate calls to NeedsToBeShown etc.

I don't think a plugin "spying" on the keyboard events would work, because any active video plugin "eats" keypresses: GBPVR assumes the plugin handles them, and does nothing more with them (so no changing channels, etc). This may actually be a bug, since the "handled" return value has no effect.

[fla]

Yes I tried other keys. With my hauppauge remote, the volume changes themselves are + and - keys. Pressing + and - on the keyboard also has the up to 1 second delay.

I guess I'll wait for the api to have a way to do this.

Thanks for the replies!

[Snarky]

An odd thing is happening to my video plugin. If the video plugin is active, needsToBeShown() still gets called every second. That's fine, and I usually just return true for as long as I want to be active.

However, if I return false in needsToBeShown(), my plugin sometimes disappears, or becomes invisible. If I move the mouse, it appears again. It's not deactivated, it just stops being rendered to the screen.

This is actually pretty neat, and I'm trying to use it as a workaround for the "9962 renders" bug. But it's not entirely reproduceable. Sometimes it takes a while before the plugin disappears, and I'm not sure exactly why. Has this happened to anyone else?

[Snarky]

Wow, this is even stranger than I thought at first. The plugin doesn't disappear because needsToBeShown() returns false. It disappears because it wasn't activated by returning true in needsToBeShown() in the first place.

Video plugins behave differently depending on how they are activated!

If a plugin is activated by pressing [number]-F11, or by calling SwitchToVideoPlugin(), it becomes invisible after about 3 minutes, and its render() method is no longer called. But if you move the mouse, it becomes visible again, for a few seconds.

However, if a plugin is activated by returning true when needsToBeShown() is called, it never becomes invisible, and render() is called every second while it's active.

(Also, if the plugin is activated by calling SwitchToVideoPlugin(), its actual Activate() method never gets called.)

Bizarre. Well, it took me days to figure this out, so hopefully others don't have to go through the same work, now.