The internal video player does not hide the ICS navigation buttons

I'm not sure how they do it, but most Android media players (MX Player, Mobo Player, Netflix, etc) will "hide" the ICS navigation soft buttons while playing a video. This reduces them to dark grey dots, that do not distract from the video.

On tablets, this also hides the system clock and the notification bar, which can be very bright relative to the video. 

I would love for the integrated video player to also hide/dim the soft keys in the same way.

This post on StackOverflow looks relevant:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9729464/hide-status-bar-on-android-ice-cream-sandwich