[mythtv-users] myth & screen saver/screen power management

[Michael T. Dean]

On 02/03/2010 10:16 PM, Josh White wrote:
> I have a question that will require a little back story to properly
> frame...here goes:
>
> A while back, I had a frontend running on a G4 eMac running Debian
> etch.  It worked great, but when I updated to .22, it was simply too
> slow, and I had trouble making the eMac work with the updated version
> of Debian.  What I've come to think of as one of the best features of
> the way this setup worked was how the screen was handled.  I had this
> frontend in my bedroom, and would often fall asleep with a movie or
> recorded TV playing.  What would happen in this case was whatever I
> was playing would finish, and mythfrontend would fall back to whatever
> screen I played the file from.  Then 5 or 10 minutes later, the
> computer would shut off the screen.  When I upgraded to myth .22, I
> replaced this machine with a zotac ion machine running Ubuntu 9.10
> (which is wonderful) except, I cannot seem to reproduce the screen
> saver/screen power off functionality that I liked in my former setup. 

If you run xscreensaver or GNOME screensaver, Myth will poke the
screensaver during playback to prevent it from activating.  You'll
likely need to set the screensaver timeout to 2 minutes or higher to
make it work (but the system would be nearly unusable with it set to 1
minute, anyway).

If you're running KDE's screensaver, it can be made to work properly
with a wrapper script.

Mike