Screensaver activated while watching a movie under GNOME 3

open VLC, load and play a movie longer than the time setting for dimming screen to save power.

When reaching that setting the screen dims (or screensaver gets activiated) hiding the movie.

It would be nice that VLC could integrate with the GNOME desktop as well, VLC being considered as a cross platform application.

It would be nice if GNOME desktop stop changing API every 2 days :D

VLC uses xdg-screensaver from xdg-utils for this. If XDG and GNOME cannot agree on how to inhibit the screensaver, then VLC should probably not even try to solve the problem.

When GNOME starts following standards, we might care.

added Status::not VLC label

closed

ok, so as a user I'm just reporting that it's not working (on both sides). Now the feedback I have gathered is that xdg-screensaver should not be used to disable the screensaver. In fact, it's been reported many times by gnome-screensaver developers that xdg-screensaver was broken.

There are D-Bus APIs to disable the screensaver, which VLC should be using. In the worst case, VLC should be poking at the screen, like MPlayer and xine-ui do, using XTest.

I am just the 'man in the middle', please don't shoot me ;-)

Thank you.

removed Status::not VLC label

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Poking at the X screensaver directly is broken. The interface provided by X is rather limited; when VLC called it, some interferences with some desktop screensaver settings was noticed by a number of users. To make matters worse, a number of users have reported that it is slow as hell causing visible lags in video rendering.

So no.

xdg-screensaver is capable of using D-Bus. If it does not work, it's either a GNOME bug or an xdg-utils bug. Topic closed.

added Status::not VLC label

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So would it be possible for you to file a bug about this xdg-screensaver problem? You obviously know a lot more than I do about what VLC does and how.

Thank you.

Replying to [comment:1 jb]:

It would be nice if GNOME desktop stop changing API every 2 days :D

It's been the same API for the past 2 years, and there was another API for as long as gnome-screensaver has existed. So that's 2 APIs in about 7 years I think.

Anyway, xdg-screensaver is a pile of crap, and that's been mentioned many times. Is there any reason why VLC can't use the D-Bus API directly, so that when VLC crashes, or disappears, the inhibition is removed as appropriate?

Maybe xdg-screensaver is a pile of crap. I think its "client" interface is actually quite nice: binding the inhibition to a X11 window seems like a good idea, as far as the screen is concerned. It seems much better than say the org.freedesktop.ScreenSaver interface exposed by KDE. For one thing, I don't want to depend on D-Bus for something display related, especially when there is no sane non-glib C bindings to D-Bus (libdbus is crap and not thread-safe).

It might be that the xdg-screensaver implementation is crap though. Using shell script as a programming language is certainly not the most flexible choice.

So if your only suggestion is a GNOME-proprietary D-Bus interface, then it's not acceptable. I consider it a GNOME bug then.

Just to be clear:

• I am OK using D-Bus, not keen on it, but still OK.
• But I am not OK implementing a GNOME-specific protocol. And to this day, the only two FD.o/XDG "standards" that I am aware of are the X11 screensaver interface (which I guess we all agree is not good here) and xdg-utils/xdg-screensaver.

why not just send fake key events? this could be the most generic solution IMO ..

Original author: oblique

removed Status::not VLC label

reopened

Because fake key events would be delivered to whichever window has focus, and cause whatever subsequent confusion?

added Status::needs more info label

closed