A fullscreen splash-screen wrapper for launching a game or app. It displays an image (or a fallback black screen), starts your executable, and closes when the process exits or loses focus after launch.

Features

Fullscreen, borderless splash screen with hidden cursor (SDL2)
Displays a supplied image via SDL2_image or video via ffmpeg (fallback to black if load fails)
Launches the target executable and exits when it finishes
Hides on focus loss after the game starts or closes on Esc

Build Requirements

C compiler (GCC or Clang)
make
pkg-config
SDL2
SDL2_image
ffmpeg (libavformat, libavcodec, libswscale, libavutil)

Install

Arch Linux (PKGBUILD) for integrating with your system package manager:

makepkg -si

For other distributions, build and install manually:

# Build the binary into build/
make

# Install system-wide (defaults to /usr/local)
sudo make install

# Staged install (useful for packaging):
DESTDIR=/some/staging/path make install

Smoke test (headless)

Run a lightweight headless smoke test that uses the dummy video driver so it doesn't require a display:

make check

Usage

gsplash <image_or_video_path> <game_executable> [game_arguments...]

Example:

gsplash assets/splash.jpg /path/to/game --fullscreen --profile=default

# Video splash (supported formats depend on ffmpeg build)
gsplash assets/splash.mp4 /path/to/game --fullscreen --profile=default

Gsplash allows you to configure how the image or video is displayed with 3 modes:

center (default): letterbox
crop: fill screen by cropping
stretch: Distort to fill screen

You can set these by using the -m or --mode flag:

build/gsplash [--mode=stretch|center|crop] <background> <executable> [args...]

build/gsplash -m stretch|center|crop <background> <executable> [args...]