#1 2017-01-08 18:46:23

o9000

tint2 developer

From: Network Neighborhood

Registered: 2015-10-24

Posts: 417

Website

VLC with Christmas hat - forever!

VLC shows an icon with a Christmas hat on dates between Christmas and New Year.

We can trick it to show the icon on any other date using libfaketime and its CLI utility faketime. It uses an LD_PRELOAD trick to override the functions that read the current time for a given program, either freezing the clock on a specified date and time, or applying an offset. It can even speed it up or slow it down, bot we don't need that here. What we'll use is the offset.

The date is checked only once when the interface is created and the icon is set, so this is what needs to be changed. If we let faketime keep running, it will break video playback Not sure why it happens, but we can tell faketime to revert to the normal clock after some delay.

The full working solution is:

sudo apt install faketime
FAKETIME_STOP_AFTER_SECONDS=5 faketime -f "@2016-12-25 $(date +%H:%M:%S)" vlc

FAKETIME_STOP_AFTER_SECONDS=5 causes the time to come back to normal after 5 seconds.

$(date +%H:%M:%S) returns the current time in hh:mm:ss format.

"2016-12-25 $(date +%H:%M:%S)" forms a timestamp for the current time, but having the date changed to December 25.

Finally, the "@" sign and the -f switch tells faketime to use the timestamp as an origin, not to freeze the time.

Last edited by o9000 (2017-01-08 18:46:47)

Sector11

Mod Squid Tpyo Knig

From: Upstairs

Registered: 2015-08-20

Posts: 8,028

Re: VLC with Christmas hat - forever!

Interesting I use faketime with conky, to test, and have never had a conky freeze because it was started with a "faked time"

Wouldn't:

faketime '2016-12-25 00:00:00'

work just as well?

And to the best of my knowledge (and probably wrong) should work as long as vlc is running.

While not vlc this is running quite nicely for the duration of writing this post.

faketime '2016-12-25 00:00:00' mpv %f --no-border --geometry=60:60 /media/5/movies/StephenHawking.mp4

How long before it breaks?

EDIT:  Or is it because No Icon ??

---

Debian 12 Beardog, SoxDog and still a Conky 1.9er

o9000

tint2 developer

From: Network Neighborhood

Registered: 2015-10-24

Posts: 417

Website

Re: VLC with Christmas hat - forever!

Well, with vlc it doesn't work. Could be a race or a deadlock since vlc uses threads. I could have looked into it but I don't have time, so I submitted a bug report.