GTK3 Proposed Patch Version 3.22.25 & KDE Server Side Decorations Patch -- Included?

[Roasted]

Hi friends. After an unsuccessful swing at the IRC channels, I'm trying my luck here to see if anybody else happens to be testing the particular scenario I'm looking at.

It's no secret that Gnome focuses on CSD - Client Side Decorations. There are a number of programs out there that don't do CSD and depend on SSD instead - Server Side Decorations. One of the apps I'm using falls into the category of depending on SSD to present a titlebar and window decorations, known as MPV, a popular video player. Other apps fall into this same camp, though MPV is the, do I dare say "target", of this post. Side note: MPV defaults to using X (xwayland), though through the mpv.conv file you can force Wayland mode, which is necessary if you want to utilize hardware acceleration (which I'm doing). By enforcing Wayland mode, you eliminate the window decoration because MPV is now requiring SSD and not getting it, while Gnome is ignorantly assuming CSD and likewise, not seeing it -- thus no window decoration.

A patch was written and submitted upstream. As indicated by devs in IRC, GTK3, specifically version 3.22.25 in the Proposed repository on Ubuntu 17.10, should have these packages available for download and testing. By running apt list --upgradable | grep 3.22.25, I was presented with a list of these GTK3 packages, and thus installed them. The end result of this is me having GTK 3.22.25 on Ubuntu 17.10. Hold that thought.

Simultaneously, my Antergos laptop updated to Gnome 3.26.2 (17.10 has 3.26.1 currently). On a hunch I fired up MPV and... huzzah! Window decorations! And I was using Wayland! Woohoo! I checked in the package manager for GTK3 and sure enough, I was on version 3.22.25. Same version as what I pulled down from Proposed on my 17.10 system. [Resuming my hold-that-thought remark above] : The catch is, my Ubuntu 17.10 system *still* fails to draw window decorations on MPV in a Wayland session.

I spoke to the patch author who said the patch is specific to GTK3 and others have said the exact gnome-shell package version shouldn't have any bearing on that. I asked this due to the fact Antergos is on 3.26.2 while 17.10 is on 3.26.1. In the end, it sounds like this patch is rather specific to GTK3 and not tied to other packages. Maybe I'm wrong? Maybe it's dependent on other Gnome components being on a specific version? From what reading I did, I couldn't find evidence to suggest that there was any deciding factor on this KDE SSD Protocol patch depending on anything other than GTK3 version 3.22.25.

With that said, here I am, throwing a hail-mary in an effort to try and dig up some information surrounding this topic. Clearly the patch works in GTK3 as it works in Antergos, but what I'm after is why it's not working in the same version of GTK3 on a different distro. Given that this is in Proposed and there's been a lengthy, massive outcry in the MPV camp for window decorations in Wayland (along with other apps that other folks use also suffering from lack of SSD) I find myself more inclined with curiosity to poke at this. Is anybody else out there testing out 17.10 with proposed enabled? Has anybody tried MPV in particular in a wayland session, specifically with the line gpu-context=wayland entered into your ~/.config/mpv/mpv.conf file to enforce Wayland-mode on MPV? Again, MPV may be the topic of this question, but other apps exist that also fall into this same category of being rather server-side-decoration dependent.

In short, I'm wondering if GTK3 version 3.22.25 in Proposed includes the KDE SSD Protocol patch, and if so, why it's not working in its (my?) current state of my 17.10 installation.

Thanks for any help.

[jbicha]

Ubuntu's mpv has some patches.

[Roasted]

Thanks. I see that. The Ubuntu-packaged MPV seems to have some issues though in my testing. I haven't filed any formal bug reports yet, but v0.26 provided by Ubuntu gives me some issues when dealing with online videos, e.g. YouTube. Heavy gray artifacts on videos as seen here and drag/drop from Firefox/Chrome to an MPV window that doesn't seem to respond regardless of what I try. The only way I was able to instigate the YouTube video resulting in the linked screenshot was by launching it via terminal, i.e. mpv youtube.com/video/etc. Even then it's touch and go, because if you have a too-up-to-date youtube-dl, all videos fail with MPV 0.26 due to an incompatibility that existed in between 0.26 and 0.27. I've been putting more time into using MPV from a PPA provided by mc3man, which out of the gate works better with drag/drop and so far, no gray artifacts whatsoever. The PPA version bumps MPV to v0.27, so perhaps that provides a difference with these particular features (drag/drop, etc).

The thesis of this thread though is regarding the behaviors I am seeing when comparing MPV to Antergos and Ubuntu, though both distros have the same GTK version. Something I discovered was my Antergos rig falls back to vaapi-copy as it cites gpu-context=wayland is an unknown option. I found this to be weird since I thought (assumed?) it was added in v0.27, which I have on Antergos. As a result, vaapi does not work (the gpu-context flag is seemingly required for vaapi), so it falls back to vaapi-copy. This might be a "my bad" thing in my testing, as I believed I had gpu-context=wayland, hwdec=vaapi, vo=opengl set in Antergos *and* it worked fine *with* window decorations. If that would be the case, then I'd question what was happening in Ubuntu to lack the window decorations. The trick is, I'm not actually working with vaapi in Antergos as I thought. It stands to reason that *if* I get vaapi working (which would require gpu-context=wayland to be working as it's a dependent setting of hwdec=vaapi from what I've been told), then this mystery could still result in Antergos acting just like Ubuntu in that it may too lack window decorations. Total speculation though, as this is something I'll have to work with on the Antergos side to even compare fairly. Roughly translated, the original point of why I posted this thread (MPV behavior in Antergos vs Ubuntu) is actually up in the air due to these recent findings as even my Antergos install isn't fully working with vaapi yet.

Random side note: MPV is a very fast moving target. Lots of changes in quick succession with, at times, "breaking points" where massive differences may exist between versions (sometimes to the capacity of works-fine vs xyz-feature-not-working-whatsoever) that I can't help but to wonder about the emphasis of MPV in Ubuntu 17.10 given Ubuntu's nature of not typically keeping apps like this up to date. If MPV is going to be leveraged as a recommended go-to, it'll quickly antiquate itself in the static repos. I'm not sure if there's a hidden config somewhere from Ubuntu's packaged MPV v0.26 that is causing the lack of drag/drop or the heavy gray artifacts that I'm currently seeing, but if not, then it stands to reason that MPV in the 17.10 repos is really only useful as a local video player. Just my 2c from an end-user perspective.

EDIT - It took some digging but I found a few videos (I seemed to hit a lot of I tried to play Taylor Swift's most recent/popular videos) that act up using MPV, both 0.26 and 0.27 (PPA version) in Ubuntu as well as 0.27 in Antergos. Youtube-dl in both cases is up to date. The catch comes in when I use either vaapi or vaapi-copy. If I just use software rendering, things work fine. I'm not sure where this cross up comes from, whether it's MPV, whether it's vaapi/vaapi-copy, or whether it's Wayland. I'm all for hardware acceleration, but at the time of this writing I guess I have to question whether I want to use MPV as a local-only player and take advantage of vaapi and just let web browser videos remain in the browser, or if I want to give up hardware acceleration (for now) and let MPV play 'all the things in all the places'. Too bad Totem (which has hardware accel now using gstreamer instead of ffmpeg like MPV) doesn't play vevo videos. Otherwise that'd be too easy to leverage as an alternative. Anyway, just something I took note of this morning with fresh eyes.