xine no longer inhibits the screensaver

[Andrew Aylett]

Binary package hint: xine-ui

Before Karmic, playing video in xine would automatically suspend the screensaver. Having updated to Karmic, the screensaver will now activate while video is playing.

Steps to reproduce:
1) Find a video longer than your screensaver time-out (or adjust the timeout to suit).
2) Play the video while not generating any keyboard or mouse activity

What happens:
The screensaver will activate after its time-out period.

What's expected:
The screensaver will not activate until after the video has ended.

ProblemType: Bug
Architecture: i386
Date: Tue Oct 13 21:10:34 2009
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 9.10
Package: xine-ui 0.99.5+cvs20070914-2.1
ProcEnviron:
 LANGUAGE=en_GB.utf8
 LC_COLLATE=C
 PATH=(custom, user)
 LANG=en_GB.UTF8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 2.6.31-12.41-generic
SourcePackage: xine-ui
Uname: Linux 2.6.31-12-generic i686

[Dominique Quatravaux (dominique-quatravaux)]

I can confirm this behavior on the same xine-ui version.

This may or may not be related: the file /usr/share/doc/xine-ui/changelog.Debian.gz mentions for this release

  * Change screensaver control code to use xdg-screensaver instead of
    faking keystrokes (Closes: #374644)

Unfortunately xdg-screensaver seems to rely on DCOP which on Karmic doesn't seem all that useful to control the screensaver:

$ xdg-screensaver lock
ERROR: Couldn't attach to DCOP server!
$ dcopserver
$ xdg-screensaver lock
call failed

I seem to remember that DCOP is deprecated in KDE in favor of DBus these days, perhaps this might explain things?

[Igor Wojnicki (wojnicki)]

Same here! That's very annoying. I ended up disabling the screensaver completely, keeping the power manager to switch to the standby mode after a couple of minutes.

[Andrew Aylett (andrew-aylett)]

You can (and I do) temporarily disable the screensaver using the command `gnome-screensaver-command --inhibit`. If you run it in a terminal, the screensaver won't activate until you kill it with Ctrl-C. Of course, I then either forget to disable the screensaver before starting a video or forget to re-enable it afterwards...

[Nigel Cunningham (nigelc)]

Even with xdg-screensaver running, I still had the screensaver kicking in. So then I tried killing and removing the binary, and still had problems. Now I'm giving xset commands a go. It seems to be well and truly broken!

[BeJay (bjdag79)]

Yep I've noticed this too, but only after getting a new LED TV Samsung (UA40C5000). It doesn't seem to matter if the screensaver is enabled or not (or the power options) it only comes kicks in when using xine (not watching TV with mythtv for example). This didn't happen with my old 32" Viewsonic TV, so it's something specific that the monitor can support it seems.

[Michele Roviello (micheleroviello)]

I have this problem in lucid.

[Andrew Aylett (andrew-aylett)]

I still have this issue in Maverick.

[Wladimir Mutel (mwg)]

In Natty-pre, with KDE 4.6.2 and xine 1.1.19-2ubuntu5 , this is no longer reproduced. Screensaver is properly disabled during xine run. Thank you .