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I'm on a 10.04 machine with MPlayer, version SVN-r1.0~rc3+svn20090426-4.4.3.

When you invoke MPlayer from the command line to show a file, it displays the file within a window. This bar has a title, "MPlayer".

enter image description here

How can I disable this bar, entirely? I don't want to remove the title only, but the complete window bar. It's probably not an MPlayer option, but rather something with the window toolkit?

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Sorry, didn't catch that earlier — yes, I want to remove the complete window decoration, to more or less have a borderless video playing. –  slhck Jan 10 '12 at 22:28

3 Answers 3

up vote 23 down vote accepted

If it's just for MPlayer you could use the -noborder argument. ;)

mplayer -noborder my_video.ogg

Screenshot of How fast.ogg

As a more general option, if you're using Compiz (default), you can:

  1. Install and launch the CompizConfig Settings Manager (Install)
  2. Select the Window Decoration plugin and hit the "plus" sign next to "Decoration Windows".
  3. Describe the type of window you do not want title bars on with an "And" relationship, and mark "Invert". For example:

Window Class: MPlayer, And relation, Inverted

Click "Add" and enjoy!

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Does the first method work only for MPlayer, or only for .ogg files? It failed to work for a .avi file with Totem. –  Satchit Bhogle Jan 10 '12 at 16:17
Seems like option #1 does the trick already — I'll check tomorrow to be sure. Thanks for the great answer! –  slhck Jan 10 '12 at 22:28
@SatchitBhogle The '-noborder' switch is an mplayer-specific feature. –  erjiang Jan 11 '12 at 3:33
What if we want to do it with some other app - any straightforward way? –  Primož Kralj Oct 17 '12 at 16:05

One can remove the border of all windows, it is however a little hacky. I described the process a bit at:


And have some code floating around at:


Using the code from the git repository you can do:

./windowtool.py --decorations 0 ACTIVE

Which will deactivate the border, using 1 instead of 0 will reactivate it. ACTIVE refers to the window that has currently the focus, you can also give the window id which you can obtain via:

wmctrl -l

PS: The code isn't pretty and the README in there is a bit out of date.

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I removed any unrelated stuff and created a tiny script that simply toggles the titlebar of the active window, here: gist.github.com/1815146 (I bind it to super+r in xfce keyboard settings, works nicely for youtube popouts along with always-on-top) –  unhammer Feb 13 '12 at 8:56

You can use the -title option:

mplayer -title ' ' file.avi
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Sorry, I wasn't being clear. I wanted to get rid of the border entirely (see Jacob's answer above). –  slhck Jan 10 '12 at 22:44

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