Question

I’m working on a simple video player in Python and PyGTK, using VLC as player backend. I want to show the video image in a gtk.DrawingArea so, in Linux, I use builder.get_object(‘drawingarea1’).window.xid to get the XID of the DrawingArea widget. In Windows, according to documentation, I have to use builder.get_object(‘drawingarea1’).window.handle, but when I start to play a video file, it gets played in the whole window, not just in the gtk.DrawingArea. I started digging to find what’s happening and I found that the number retrieved from builder.get_object(‘mainWindow’).window.handle is the same with builder.get_object(‘drawingarea1’).window.handle. Is this the right method to get the handler of a widget, or I do something wrong?

Answer 1

I’m not sure what exactly you’ve done without an example, however I did a bit of searching and found this question and possible answer here http://python.6.n6.nabble.com/gtk-DrawingArea-handle-id-on-win32-bug-td1943074.html. And an example was attached. The link http://library.gnome.org/devel/gtk/2.18/gtk-migrating-ClientSideWindows.html he provides does not exist any more, but I found a updated link http://developer.gnome.org/gtk/2.24/gtk-migrating-ClientSideWindows.html. Essentially it seems you must call

drawingarea.window.ensure_native()

to make the

drawingarea.window.handle

attribute return the correct native handle of the drawingarea

On Linux getting the attribute

drawingarea.window.xid

automatically calls

drawingarea.window.ensure_native()

but

drawingarea.window.handle

does not do this for you.

I hope this helps.