gosd.py

A simple Qt OSD written in Python 3 and designed for use with MPD.

I made this because I couldn't find any OSDs I liked. As seen in the screenshot, this OSD shows the following information by default:

• Thumbnail of an image from the directory of the current MPD track (prioritizing files with front or cover in the name).
• MPD current track information (artist, song title, track number, album).
• Number of TMSU tags on the "artist directory", "album directory", and file of the current MPD track.
• Index of the current track in MPD's playlist, and the total playlist length.
• Whether jack_capture is running (represented with ●).
• Whether MPD's "single" mode is on (represented with 🗘)
• Whether MPD is in consume mode (represented with ᗧ).
• MPD status (i.e. playing or paused, represented with ▶ and ■).
• Current time and total time of the track.
• MPD random mode (represented with ⇄ for random and → for sequential).
• ALSA volume and mute status.
• Current time and date.

It also has the following features:

• Automatically updates the displayed information while visible.
• Automatically hides after 10 seconds (by default), or can be manually hidden by clicking on the OSD or with python gosd_go.py HIDE.
  • When other text is specified, the length of time it is shown on screen depends on the number of lines in the text (the default hide time, or 1 second per line, whichever is greater).
• Somewhat easy to customize (if you know Python); just edit the osdtext.py file.

It has the following problems:

• Written in Python (which is slow, though it's not a huge problem in this case). In the (probably far) future I'd like to rewrite this in a compiled language; maybe Zig, maybe Lisp, maybe Rust; who knows.
• User customizations must be done by editing the source of the script itself.
• Positioning of the OSD has to be done by editing the place function in gosd.py.
• Assumes your music is stored in an ARTIST/ALBUM/TRACK structure.
• Plenty others.

Requirements

• Python 3+
• qtpy - a consistent interface to various versions of Qt
• any of qtpy's required backends: pyqt5, pyqt, pyqt4, pyside2, or pyside
• python-mpd2 - for getting MPD status information
• Qt, obviously

How to Use

Run python gosd.py & and then you should see the word "Started" in the bottom right corner of your screen. That means the OSD is running. The message will disappear after a few seconds, but the OSD is still running. To display it, simply call python gosd_go.py. This will make the OSD re-appear, showing you the default text. If you want the OSD to go away sooner, you can click on it or use the command python gosd_go.py HIDE.

If you want the OSD to display something else, you can run gosd_go.py with a dash as an argument: python gosd_go.py -. gosd_go.py will read from standard input, and once it gets an 'End Of File' (usually you can make this by pressing ctrl+d), it will send all the text to the gosd process to be displayed. This can be very useful, for example, to display MPD's current playlist with pipes: mpc playlist | python gosd_go.py -. Alternatively, you can specify the text as the arguments: python gosd_go.py 'hi there' will display "hi there" in the OSD.

To make the OSD display the output of a command and automatically update the text when the command's output changes, specify the command to run prefixed with gosd-auto-update-command:. For example, to tail a log, run python gosd_go.py 'gosd-auto-update-command:tail /path/to/program.log', or to watch the last 10 lines of journalctl, run python gosd_go.py 'gosd-auto-update-command:journalctl -e -n 10'. I typically use this functionality for my playerctl-metadata script, to show information about media being played in players other than MPD, i.e. python gosd_go.py 'gosd-auto-update-command:playerctl-metadata'.

If you want to change what information is displayed in the default OSD text, edit the osdtext.py file; specifically, the getText function.

TODO

Right now gosd.py is "good enough" for me, but I do want to improve a few things:

• Improve the command-line argument syntax of gosd_go.py.
• Allow specifying the hide time on the command line.
• Allow specifying the text alignment on the command line.
• Allow displaying text in tables.
• Allow displaying arbitrary images.
• Hide the album cover when showing something other than the default text.
• Use a Unix socket file instead of TCP.