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

[Michael T. Dean]

On 02/04/2010 11:12 AM, Josh White wrote:
> On Thu, Feb 4, 2010 at 12:52 AM, Michael T. Dean wrote:
>   
>> 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.
>>     
> I'm running Ubuntu 9.10 AMD64/Gnome, and I'm using the defalut screensaver
> (I'm not sure which one it actually is). I tried setting the screensaver to
> 2 minutes, and unfortunately, the screensaver starts about 2 minutes
> into playback (as if nothing told it not to).  I would guess that this
> "poke" that myth directs at the screensaver is where things fail (just how
> does this "poke" occur?  What does "poke" mean in this context? I'm not
> trying to be sarcastic, if this is a common term that I am unaware of,
> please educate me;) ).

In the case of gnome-screensaver, it literally means poke:

gnome-screensaver-command --poke

>   Did Ubuntu change the default screensaver with 9.10
> along with everything else?
>   

If you're running GNOME, you're almost definitely running gnome-screensaver.

ps -efw | grep screensave

> Last night I tried setting the screensaver/power management delay to 1
> hour to see what happened (it's set to start the screen saver after 59 idle
> minutes, and then power off the screen after 1 hour, which was the max idle
> time setting).
>   

In your frontend log at default verbosity (-v important,general --note
that's MythTV default, not necessarily <insert distro> default), you
should see messages:

ScreenSaverX11Private: XScreenSaver support enabled
or
ScreenSaverX11Private: Gnome screen saver support enabled

if the screensaver is running when the frontend starts.  If you don't
see those messages, MythTV thinks that no screensaver is running, so it
won't poke the screensaver.

If you start mythfrontend before the screensaver is fully started
(something I would imagine is easy to do in a "Please wait while I load
everything and the kitchen sink" desktop environment like GNOME), MythTV
will find that no screensaver is running when it starts and will not
attempt to manage the screensaver.  You may just need to put a sleep
into your mythfrontend start script.

Mike