[mythtv-users] Screensaver disabling

[Tom Dexter]

On Sun, Jun 29, 2008 at 3:00 PM, Nick Morrott <knowledgejunkie at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 29/06/2008, Andrew Berry <andrewberry at sentex.net> wrote:
>> On 28-Jun-08, at 10:26 AM, Tom Dexter wrote:
>>
>>
>> > Why would you have to do any of that?  I've never needed to.
>> >
>>
>>  After a bit of troubleshooting, it turns out it's only when mplayer is
>> playing that I have problems with xscreensaver. The console says it's
>> enabling xscreensaver support, so I'll have to see why it's not waking up.
>> The irexec solution should be a quick way to get around it for now.
>
> Try adding '-stop-xscreensaver' to your mplayer command line.
>
> --
> Nick Morrott
>

That no longer works with xscreensaver with newer versions of mplayer.
 Under Gentoo this occurred when I upgraded from
mplayer-1.0_rc2_p24929-r1 to mplayer-1.0_rc2_p25993.  Here's what
apparently occurred:

There are standard screen saver handling routines built into X but
apparently xscreensaver (and apparently most others) don't use it.
The mplayer devs apparently got sick of supporting many different
methods of disabling screen savers (can't say I blame them), and went
with just the X interface when you use the -stop-screensaver option.
If you look at the mplayer man page there's a section about
-heartbeat-cmd that can be used to get around this.

I added this line to my ~/.mplayer/config file:

heartbeat-cmd="/usr/bin/xscreensaver-command -deactivate > /dev/null"

...and it works perfectly.  The only real downside of that method is
that it assumes that X is actually running locally, which would never
be an issue on a myth frontend.

Tom