A few days ago I had an argue about the OS goodies the Windovv$ users have. He said that the VLC player to play on the desktop background was a great feature, and was only available under the shitty Windouvv$ desktop manager. So I had a look at the mplayer`s hman page and look what I found: -wid <window ID> (also see -guiwid) (X11, OpenGL and DirectX only) This tells MPlayer to attach to an existing window. Useful to embed MPlayer in a browser (e.g. the plugger extension). Which means that this is feature, known from a long time to mplayer users. Now ... how do we obtain the ID of the root window???
Unlike `display` mplayer does not recognize window names, so we need to tell it. This is a piece of cake. Open a terminal and see what xwininfo does. You can either get the wid of the root window by starting the xwininfo and clicking on the desktop, or just type: xwininfo -root Where you will get something like:

kik@home:~$ xwininfo -root 

xwininfo: Window id: 0x187 (the root window) (has no name)

  Absolute upper-left X:  0
  Absolute upper-left Y:  0
  Relative upper-left X:  0
  Relative upper-left Y:  0
  Width: 1280
  Height: 1024
  Depth: 24
  Visual Class: TrueColor
  Border width: 0
  Class: InputOutput
  Colormap: 0x20 (installed)
  Bit Gravity State: ForgetGravity
  Window Gravity State: NorthWestGravity
  Backing Store State: NotUseful
  Save Under State: no
  Map State: IsViewable
  Override Redirect State: no
  Corners:  +0+0  -0+0  -0-0  +0-0
  -geometry 1280x1024+0+0

So to play a video on this window we do the next: mplayer -wid 0x187 mp3/clips/Method, Busta, B-real, Coolio - Hit Em High (Space Jam).mpg Enjoy the mplayer every time and every where