feat: tray tooltip fix, View Logs, connection status, GStreamer PATH fix

[aayushprsingh]

Summary of Changes

Fixes

• Tray tooltip newline: Removed the literal \n that was rendering as a broken newline in the tray icon tooltip
• GStreamer DLL PATH: UxPlay was crashing on startup because GStreamer plugins couldn't find their DLL dependencies. Added the uxplay bin directory to PATH before launching.
• Windows path parsing: Fixed shlex.split() corrupting Windows paths (C:\Users becomes C:Users). Replaced with simple whitespace split + quote stripping.

Features

• View Logs: New menu item that opens uxplay-windows.log in Notepad for easy debugging
• Connection Status: Tray tooltip now updates every 5 seconds to show if UxPlay server is Running or Stopped (with exit code if crashed)

Known Limitation

• Recording (removed): The Record Screen (MP4) feature was removed because it requires UxPlay 1.73+ which has no pre-built Windows binary. The bundled uxplay.exe is UxPlay 1.71.1 which does not support the -mp4 flag. Manual recording can still be enabled via Edit Arguments when a compatible binary is bundled.

[aayushprsingh]

Update (2026-04-05)

GUI Log Viewer reverted to Notepad: The Tkinter-based log viewer had font/scrollbar rendering issues when packaged with PyInstaller on Windows. View Logs now opens the log file in Notepad, which is reliable. A web-based approach may be revisited in a future release.

[aayushprsingh]

Update 2 (2026-04-05)

View Logs now works correctly: Fixed to use subprocess.Popen(['notepad.exe', path]) instead of os.startfile(). The .log file association on Windows was preventing os.startfile from opening Notepad.

[leapbtw]

as i wrote in the README i am working on other branches and i'm rewriting uxplay-windows from scratch. I'll still take a look at your work but merging is unlikely

[aayushprsingh]

Thanks for the update! I understand about the rewrite.

A few questions:

1. Would you be interested in cherry-picking any of the specific fixes into the new rewrite? The most valuable ones are:

   • The GStreamer PATH fix (setting PATH before launching uxplay.exe)
   • The connection status monitoring
   • The Windows path parsing fix (shlex.split corrupts backslashes)

2. I'd be happy to contribute to the rewrite if you need help. Happy to work on Python packaging, Tkinter UI, or the tray app layer. Let me know if you'd like a hand.

[leapbtw]

Happy to work on Python packaging, Tkinter UI, or the tray app layer. Let me know if you'd like a hand

I’m currently rewriting the project in C++ in the cpp-rewrite branch.
As part of that work, I turned uxplay into a library (libuxplay) and embed it directly into another window.

The rewrite is working quite well so far. One of my goals is to drop Bonjour as a dependency, since managing its installation on Windows is an hassle and it's old and unreliable software in my experience.

The C++ version already works without Bonjour by using BLE pairing. However, that’s not a complete replacement because some desktop PCs may only have LAN and no wireless/BLE hardware.

Ideally I’d like to use Apple’s mDNSResponder, which is essentially the core component of Bonjour and is open source. The issue is that it’s built with MSVC while this project uses MSYS2, so it’s not straightforward to integrate as-is.

If you have the time and interest, this might be an area where help would be very welcome. There are also some forks of mDNSResponder around, but I’d prefer either using Apple’s upstream code directly or maintaining a minimal fork tailored to what uxplay-windows actually needs.