Fullscreen Rhythmbox Plug-in – Your parties just got slicker

By , Published July 29, 2010

Whether you're hosting a party with Rhythmbox providing the boom box duties or sat on your bed reading the latest Farscape comic and wanting to chill out with some ambiance the following fullscreen addon for Rhythmbox is just what you need.

This plug-in displays ‘album art and minimalistic info about what’s playing and what’s next‘. It comes with the following features: -

  • Pulsating hover effect
  • Album art
  • Smoothly animated progress bar
  • Control: Play/pause/skip
  • Scrolling by cursor position
  • Queued tracks merged

Installation

Installing the plug-in is a bit of a faff. Ideally you should check out the latest source using subversion: -

However you can also download a .tar.gz with the latest snapshot in if you just want to try it out: -

Once download you need to place the (extracted) 'rhythmbox-fullscreen-plugin-read-only' folder into your Rhythmbox plug-ins directory. The easiest way to do this is via the terminal.

  • mkdir -p ~/.gnome2/rhythmbox/plugins
  • mv rhythmbox-fullscreen-plugin-read-only ~/.gnome2/rhythmbox/plugins

In newer versions of Rhythmbox (wink, wink Meerkat-ers) you'll need to put the plug-in in: -

  • mv rhythmbox-fullscreen-plugin-read-only ~/.gconf/apps/rhythmbox/plugins/

Once installed the plug-in activate the plug-in via the plug-ins menu and enable via the 'fullscreen' button that will appear in your main toolbar.

Tip by Jack
Article originally appeared on omgubuntu.co.uk

Related posts:

  1. Scrobble using the official Last.FM client with Rhythmbox
  2. Rhythmbox Cover Art Browser
  3. Share Your Rhythmbox Library with Empathy Contacts
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  • Anonymous

    I’m getting an error while trying to enable this plugin :

    ImportError: No module named FullscreenView
    (rhythmbox:2407): Rhythmbox-WARNING **: Could not load plugin FullscreenView
    (rhythmbox:2407): Rhythmbox-WARNING **: Error, impossible to activate plugin ‘Fullscreen View’

    • http://www.google.com/profiles/c3rberus108 Cerberus108

      I’m getting the same error. It’s strange, shouldn’t a file named FullscreenView.py exist in the plugin folder?

    • http://twitter.com/yoursmt Chris Cuellar

      Getting the same errors on lucid. Tried moving the plugin folder to all three of the locations mentioned above. japc’s instructions didn’t work either.

    • Bram Bonné

      Try renaming the plugin folder to FullscreenView

  • Claudio

    it doesn’t work…..impossible to activate…

    • http://twitter.com/mvaillancourt Maxime Vaillancourt

      follow Japc’s instructions. ;)

  • Anonymous

    This is a pretty awesome Rhythmbox plugin, but I’ve got another idea…

    If only this could be worked in as a screensaver! Auto activate this when I’m away from my computer when music is playing so when I stroll by, I can skip/pause/whatever or just go back to work!

    • derek

      I agree.

      I don’t see why this would be so hard to implement.

  • Japc

    That’s not how you install. At least here (Lucid Lynx) the rhythmbox plugin path is ~/.local/share/rhythmbox/plugins/.

    And you should move put it in a directory with the plugin name:

    ~/.local/share/rhythmbox/plugins/FullscreenView

    That should do it.

    • Speque

      These instructions worked for me. Using Lucid.

    • Schiwe

      Thanks!

    • http://twitter.com/mvaillancourt Maxime Vaillancourt

      Works for me too! Thank you very much, Japc!

    • Clecol

      Thanks Japc, that works like a charm

  • http://el-bhm.myopenid.com/ el-bhm

    True nerds got no parties.

    • daas88

      maybe for ubuntu install parties? xD

  • Clecol

    this would be really cool, but I just can’t get it to work correctly in lucid

  • Anonymous

    Put it in ~/.gconf/ ?
    Is that right? Seems like a weird place to put it.

    I would just recommend the user to:
    - Hit Alt+F2
    - Type in .local/share/rhythmbox and hit enter
    - Create folder named plugins
    - Extract into that folder

  • http://wakoopa.com/xfact XFACT

    I wish I could do such party :| Well, nice add on though :)

  • ninjapirate89

    Rhythmbox hasn’t had fullscreen this whole time? It seems like Banshee has had it forever.

    • Anonymous

      it did but no that cool

  • http://twitter.com/Tobotron Tobias Franklin

    Used your instructions on 10.04 managed to get the plugin to appear in the plugin menu but cannot activate it…plugin doesn’t specify which version of rhythmbox to run, currently using ver. 0.12.8 maybe its not compatible?! Or am I doing something wrong?

    • http://twitter.com/Tobotron Tobias Franklin

      Scratch that had to correct a spelling mistake in the folder name lol

  • Rick

    Wonder why it only works on Lucid if it’s put under .local/share/rhythmbox/plugins, even though the rest of my plugins are located in .gconf/apps/rhythmbox/plugins…

    In any case, nice!

    And a *really* nice bonus is that while using the Lastfm plugin, it goes out and gets the covers for the music being played.

    R.
    ==

  • http://twitter.com/Nickbaskerville Nick Baskerville

    very cool! put this is up on the big screen then sit back on sofa and listen and use rhythmote to control with my phone :D weird that it’s the only plugin that has to be in ~/.local/share/rhythmbox/plugins to work

  • Surlent777

    Not working? Try this:

    Instead of following the directions listed here, do it the way the site itself describes (notice the name change)

    svn checkout http://rhythmbox-fullscreen-plugin.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/ FullscreenView
    mkdir -p ~/.gnome2/rhythmbox/plugins
    mv FullscreenView ~/.gnome2/rhythmbox/plugins

    • http://twitter.com/yoursmt Chris Cuellar

      This is the only one that worked for me. Rhythmbox 0.12.8

  • Anonymous

    Sorry for the fact that this has nothing to do with the post, but I really, really need help. I have Ubuntu Lucid and wanted to reinstall but I only had a Karmic CD so I tried to Install Karmic but then just update. So I successfully installed Karmic and was installing Lucid update after it was downloaded but my laptop ran out of battery (my charger is very faulty) and hibernated. It wouldn’t start so I forced shut down and restarted. The partition was so broken I had to reinstall Karmic but it stopped a 24% consistently saying it could not copy the files to the Hard Drive and that it could be due to (faulty CD, faulty CD drive, fault Hard Drive or a hot computer.) I don’t think its the Hard Drive because it has never shown any signs of failing before, CD drive is kind of unlikely because I installed it perfectly right before, hot computer is highly unlikely because I used ice to cool it down. I think the problem is 1. the CD and 2. the drive. What do you think? Any help would be immensely appreciated. Thank you soooo much!

  • http://twitter.com/matbonucci Miguel Torrellas

    tried changing directory
    not working

  • pak33m

    I’d just like to say that there’s a typo in the post concerning the svn checkout:

    svn checkout http://rhythmbox-fullscreen-plugin.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/ rhythmbox-fullscreen-plugin-read-only should be svn checkout http://rhythmbox-fullscreen-plugin.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/ FullscreenView

    As @Surlent777 mentioned below, the instructions at http://code.google.com/p/rhythmbox-fullscreen-plugin/ work.

    Great looking plugin btw :)