Ubuntu Unity 14.04 - How to Auto-hide Unity Top Panel

[blanik]

I am using Ubuntu 14.04 (Unity) as the Distro to support a media centre (XBMC and MythTV). For this purpose Unity is mostly suitable, especially with the Unity Launcher set to Auto-hide. I moved away from using the XFCE desktop for the media centre because recent versions of XFCE seem to not be supporting large screen 1080P devices (i.e. large screen TVs) as well as XFCE used to. For example, screen fonts in many applications will be too small and only one pixel in thickness, making them too hard to read. Changing font settings seems not to help. Unity at least seems to handle the large screen 1080P devices a littlebetter than XFCE - hence my reason for using XFCE.

Unfortunately, when watching a video in full-screen mode, the Unity Top Panel remains visible covering the top edge of the screen. For a media centre, this is not acceptable, as the presence of the Unity Top Panel over the top of the video being viewed is distracting to the viewer, and it's appearance detracts considerably from the viewing pleasure.

Can someone please advise:



How I can configure the Unity Top Panel to be Auto-hide, OR alternatively
How I can replace the Unity Top Panel with an alternative panel that will be able to be configured to Auto-hide (ideally without changing desktops again, unless the recommended alternative desktop is much more suitable).


Looking forward to receiving your response.

Thanks,

Roy

[monkeybrain20122]

Unfortunately, when watching a video in full-screen mode, the Unity Top Panel remains visible covering the top edge of the screen. For a media centre, this is not acceptable, as the presence of the Unity Top Panel over the top of the video being viewed is distracting to the viewer, and it's appearance detracts considerably from the viewing pleasure.

The top panel doesn't show when watching videos is full screen mode (see screenshot for vlc, same for mpv and smplayer) Which video player do you use?

I don't think there is a way to autohide the top panel like in xfce.

[deadflowr]

Full screen or simply Maximized Window Mode.
Nothing would show in fullscreen, you don't even need to hide the launcher because full screen hides that as well.
But maximize window mode only covers what the current window space you have, excluding the panel and, if set, the shown unity-launcher.

typically you can toggle fullscreen with F11, fwiw

From my own personal experience, the only time fullscreen did not function correctly was on a machine which really should never have used unity in the first place.