toggle vlc fullscreen using dbus and mpris

Question

I am programming my keyboard shortcuts in awesome wm. At the moment I use qdbus to control media players and they all work except for full screen of vlc. The command I use is:

qdbus org.mpris.MediaPlayer2.vlc /org/mpris/MediaPlayer2 org.mpris.MediaPlayer2.Fullscreen

This works to get the boolean value of the full screen status but should also be able to set it, what I already did is the above command followed with true/false (and a couple of variations on them) but it always gets interpreted as false.

CanSetFullscreen has value true

Answer 1

Awesome has a way to send fake key events, this can be used to overwrite the standard keys used by vlc to match the keys configured in awesome wm. Inside ~/.config/awesome/rc.lua change the fullscreen key like this:

enter code hereawful.key({ modkey,           }, "f",      function (c) 
    if awful.rules.match(c, {class = 'Vlc'}) then
        root.fake_input('key_release','f')
        root.fake_input('key_press','f')
        root.fake_input('key_release','f')
    else
        c.fullscreen = not c.fullscreen  
    end
end),

to do this with other programs you first have to get to know the class of it, this you can get with the command xprop | grep WM_CLASS.

 WM_CLASS(STRING) = "vlc", "Vlc"
                     |      |
                     |      |--- class
                     |
                     |--- instance

Answer 2

CanSetFullscreen is a read-only parameter, go check Fullscreen which is a read/write entry. for D-Bus exploration, D-Feet on Ubuntu is quite good.