Music player should not show its main window if it launches when play button is pressed

Hi Dylan,

Thats a valid point but the issue here is more todo with that fact that I literally fake a service like effect by starting the player and then once the player is up and going I send it a play command. Therefore I have no way to
when initialising the player tell it to begin in a hibernated state.

Mpt any thoughts here ?

Good thinking, Dylan.

I agree it would be more consistent if the player could start playing without its window opening in this situation.

I guess that would require introducing, and evangelizing, some new API (or even something as simple as a standard command-line option?) for a player to start up hidden and playing.

This still happens more than one year later with Rhythmbox. A quick glance at the manpage of rhythmbox-client suggests, that the necessary behaviour could be possible with it.

If the maintainer(s) of indicator-sound agree, this could specify for a Papercut.

Here is how I think it should be implemented:
1) rhythmbox should use GApplication to implement a few GAction like "play".
2) rhythmbox should install a .service file to be dbus-activatable
3) rhythmbox should install a org.gnome.Rhythmbox.desktop file that tells the actions it implements. See http://standards.freedesktop.org/desktop-entry-spec/latest/ar01s07.html
4) Unity can then start rhythmbox and play by invoking the "play" action on rhythmbox, using g_desktop_app_info_launch_action().

Most of the work should be done upstream IMHO.

Yeah, this is impossible in the current spec. It's definitely not a Papercut: while you can start rhythmbox-client headless, there's no way for media players to specify the command for their headless mode in the desktop file.

Xavier, I very much agree. We just need one additional thing in .desktop files: Implements.

Then we could have Implements=org.freedesktop.MediaPlayer, which entails having the actions you're suggestions (don't even need to be GActions, org.freedesktop.Application has an ActivateAction as well).

I'm planning to write this up at some point and suggest it on the next freedesktop summit.