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:

• MPD now playing information (artist, song title, track number, album).
• Whether the artist directory, album directory, and track itself are tagged with TMSU.
• 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 (i.e. random or no random, represented with ⇄ and →).
• ALSA volume.
• Current time and date.
• Thumbnail of the album cover of the current track, if an image of such appears in the directory of the track.

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 Rust.
• User customizations must be done by editing the source of the script itself.
• No functionality to detect the number of screens you have, nor to easily change the position of the OSD (you'll need to edit the place function in gosd.py).
• Assumes your music is stored in an ARTIST/ALBUM/TRACK structure.
• Plenty others.

• 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

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.

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

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.
• Hide the album cover when showing something other than the default text.