Preventing screensaver when playing movie?

[Graeme Gill]

Erik wrote:
> Graeme Gill skrev:
> 
>>(such as xscreensaver and the gnome screensaver) don't hook into the X11 screensaver functions.
>>  
> 
> You have reported those bugs, right? Please post the links here so 
> others can subscribe.

They are not regarded as bugs by the authors, so they aren't going
to change anything. Even if they were fixed, it doesn't
solve the problem of deploying applications to existing systems.

> *shudder* Do not do that! Just cut that cruft out of your code and call 
> XResetScreenSaver. Both MPlayer and SDL did that already.

XResetScreenSaver doesn't work with xscreensaver and gnome-screensaver.
(I haven't checked KDE yet). Gnome-screensaver needs some gnome-sceensaver
specific magic using dbus. This can be done directly if the dbus libraries
are linked in, but xscreensaver basically requires a fork & exec.

> If YOU want to fix gnome-screensaver bugs, do it in gnome-screensaver 
> and not in all media players and what not out there! Or just wait for 
> the gnome people to get their act together. Send any complaining 
> gnome-screensaver users over to gnome-screensaver.

This doesn't help the users. They don't care who's fault it is,
they just want it to work.

> No it will not. dbus is not a depencendy of X11. So we can not depend on 
> dbus for the basic functionality of X11. (Screensavers belong to the 
> basic functinality of X11.) The only way to fix gnome-screensaver is to 
> fix gnome-screensaver. There is no way around that.

There is a wide scope here, that probably falls outside the
purview of X11.  dbus is for handling system wide events, so
user activity and triggering screensavers and power savers
seems to be very much in its scope. It would be nice
to have a single dbus event for user activity though
(rather than org.gnome.ScreenSaver.SimulateUserActivity,
org.KDE.ScreenSaver.SimulateUserActivity,
org.someotherapp.UserIsDoingSomething etc. etc.).
Perhaps if this were organized properly, some of
the XScreenSaver functions would issue the right
dbus events, making it all work again ?

Graeme Gill.