Overlaying gtk widgets over a drawingarea

["Toufeeq Hussain" <toufeeqh gmail com>]

Hi All,

I'm looking at various possibilities of using gtk for implementing a
complex bit of functionality in a video player. Here is my
requirement.

I have a drawing area which will be used to play a video using
gstreamer. Now I need to overlay a few gtk widgets on top of this
drawingarea. The number of widgets which will get overlayed is not
known and could be anywhere from 3-5 at any point of time based on the
operation of the program.

A good to have feature would be alpha-blending wherein there is
tranlucency of the overlayed widgets so that the underlying video
(drawing area) can be seen.

I looked around and got a few options which I yet to try out. Thought
I will get advice here before I start the implementation.

* Gnome Canvas looks like the best bet though I haven''t looked at it
in detail. I add a drawing area to the canvas and add the widgets
accordingly. is that possible ?

* GtkLayout : had a look at this and read somewhere in the mail
archives that z-ordering is not possible in gtklayout. This means I
cannot use it for my need, right ?

* Write a custom Gtk widget which will allow me to do the above functionality.

Comments on which is the best mode of implementation would be helpful.
Also is there any application which does this ? I know a bunch of
applications which use osd (or gnome-osd) to overlay text over
applications but I need something wherein the overlayed "text" can be
interacted with (radiobuttons, menus etc) hence thought of overlaying
widgets.

Thanks,
-Toufeeq
--
blog @ http://www.toufeeq.net