vlc does not prevent screen saver from starting

[martygeek]

I'm running VLC version 1.0.6 goldeneye on a Fedora 13 system,

Whenever I try to watch a movie, the screen saver kicks in. This happens no matter if the movie is on
the main LCD monitor, the 2nd head, a samsung big screen TV, under either the nouveau or nvidia driver.

I know it's not a big deal as I can shut off the screensaver, but I don't have to do this on a windows
box with the same config.

Is there a setting I can set somewhere to make VLC shut off the screensaver?

Thanks,
marty

[Rémi Denis-Courmont]

GNOME screensaver is broken in recent GNOME versions. There is not much to do about it, other than manually disabling the screensaver.

[profalbert]

I'm no expert here, but it seems other media-players managed to get it working.
As I understand, vlc uses the "poke"-method to prevent the screensaver from activating (i.e. It regularly pokes the screensaver, to simulate activity)
"Poke" seems to be broken since gnome-2.26, and I guess GNOME wants rather deprecate it than fix it.

Other players register "inhibitors" with gnome-screensaver. Although it really sucks that gnome leaves a broken API, maybe vlc could fix this annoying issue by using inhibitors like many other media-player do. Also I personally find it cleaner, because it's easier to keep track of what application is preventing the screensaver from activating.
Like when playing a movie with totem:

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[profalbert@bender ~]$ gnome-screensaver-command -q The screensaver is inactive The screensaver is being inhibited by: Application="Totem"; Since="2010-06-15T12:40:26.867726Z"; Reason="Playing a movie";

On a commandline one can register an inhibitor like that:

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gnome-screensaver-command -i -n vlc -r "playing video"

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[profalbert@bender ~]$ gnome-screensaver-command -q The screensaver is inactive The screensaver is being inhibited by: Application="vlc"; Since="2010-06-15T12:54:10.390238Z"; Reason="playing video";

[titanium]

Hi,
Is this problem expected to be fixed any time soon?

[Rémi Denis-Courmont]

There are two different known issues with screensavers.

The Xorg screensaver was not preempted in VLC 1.1.0-1.1.3 because it is indenpendent from the "desktop environment" screensaver. This should already be fixed in VLC 1.1.4 preversions.

Depending on your xdg-utils/xdg-screensaver installation, the desktop screensaver may not be preempted. To fix this, you need to update xdg-utils so that xdg-screensaver works with your desktop environment. This is not really a VLC issue.