Re: Overlaying gtk widgets over a drawingarea

[Paul Davis <paul linuxaudiosystems com>]

On Tue, 2007-04-24 at 19:27 +0530, Toufeeq Hussain wrote:
> 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 ?

you don't get alpha blending in a canvas that supports widgets. they are
mutually exclusive: you can get an AA canvas that does alpha blending of
objects or a non-AA canvas that allows z-order stacking of widgets.

what you are looking for is basically the "holy grail" or "achilles
heel", depending on your viewpoint, of most modern X toolkits. don't
think that its just just a google search away - it isn't. maybe next
year, maybe the year after, but not 2006.

or maybe i am just wrong :)

--p