totem doesn't inhibit the screen blanking as it should

[Swâmi Petaramesh]

While watching a video in Ubuntu Gnome/Unity GUI with the video player (Totem), screen goes black after a while, where the use of a video player was inhibiting the screensaver to kick in in previous Ubuntu versions.

Furthermore, in Control panel, the setting for screen to go black cannot be set to "never", maximum is "one hour", which doesn't give the user the choice to use this feature or not.

Furthermore, Even when set to "One hour", my screen ingores the setting and goes black about every 10 minutes whatsoever.

What a pain in the ... to have the screen go black every 10 minutes while watching a movie !

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 11.10
Package: gnome-control-center 1:3.1.92-0ubuntu1
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 3.0.0-11.18-generic 3.0.4
Uname: Linux 3.0.0-11-generic x86_64
NonfreeKernelModules: nvidia zfs zcommon znvpair zavl zunicode
ApportVersion: 1.23-0ubuntu1
Architecture: amd64
CheckboxSubmission: 46fb4d85e0c1991660d481d0bb0eb4b1
CheckboxSystem: edda5d4f616ca792bf437989cb597002
Date: Fri Sep 23 10:38:19 2011
ProcEnviron:
 PATH=(custom, user)
 LANG=fr_FR.UTF-8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
SourcePackage: gnome-control-center
UpgradeStatus: Upgraded to oneiric on 2011-09-15 (7 days ago)
usr_lib_gnome-control-center:
 deja-dup 19.92-0ubuntu1
 gnome-bluetooth 3.1.92-0ubuntu1
 indicator-datetime 0.2.95-0ubuntu1

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

Thank you for your bug report, there seems to be several bugs there. Could you take a screenshot of the configuration dialog or list the settings there? Is that a laptop or desktop? Does settings the "dim to save power" option is used?

[Swâmi Petaramesh (swami-petaramesh)]

Which config dialog ? The one in Oneiric, related to screen lock, is very poor. Currently it has only 2 settings :

- Turn off after : 1 hour (maximum settable)
- Lock : Off (disabled)

- No "Dim to save power" option, this is a desktop machine.

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

Is there any chance you could get a gnome-settings-daemon log?

- edit /etc/xdg/autostart/gnome-settings-daemon.desktop
- change
"Exec=/usr/lib/gnome-settings-daemon/gnome-settings-daemon"
with
"Exec=/usr/lib/gnome-settings-daemon/gnome-settings-daemon --debug"
- restart your session, get the issue you described and attach .xsession-errors to the bug

Thanks for helping debugging the issue!

[Swâmi Petaramesh (swami-petaramesh)]

Attaching .xsession-errors gzipped, debug mode active, as requested.

Please note that the attached monitor turned to powersave mode after ~19 minutes while watching a movie using Totem. At the time the monitor turned off, and when it went back on after I hit a key, the error log recorded nothing special.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

Does it do it every time? Could be similar to bug #862139. Does running "xset -dpms" workaround the issue?

[Swâmi Petaramesh (swami-petaramesh)]

There are good chances, and that would make bug #862139 a duplicate of the present bug.

"xset q" shows DPMS is active with all of its timeouts set to 600, although no such thing should be set according to my control panel settings.

xset -dpms turns it off, but I'll have to wait until I watch a movie to see if it helps in that precise situation.

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

> no such thing should be set according to my control panel settings.

that's not how the GNOME components work, they don't use dpms but have their our time counter to do their actions, so technically gnome-control-center is not buggy and will stop the screen after the time you selected, it just happens that Xorg set a dpms value to 10 minutes and that GNOME doesn't stop it so

[Swâmi Petaramesh (swami-petaramesh)]

The matter is that an external monitor is turned into standby/suspend by using DPMS , not barely displaying a black image...

Furthermore, all this had been perfect for years (on same system) and has been broken by upgrading Natty => Oneiric Beta.

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

> The matter is that an external monitor is turned into standby/suspend by using DPMS , not barely displaying a black image..
> Furthermore, all this had been perfect for years (on same system) and has been broken by upgrading Natty => Oneiric Beta.

What is your point? Nobody deny it's a bug and we are just looking at how to fix it, know if xset -dpms fix it would be useful because we plan to make gnome-settings-daemon do that and we would like to know if that will be enough

[Swâmi Petaramesh (swami-petaramesh)]

@Sebastien : Tested, "xset -dpms" gives a correct workaround to the situation.

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

is that still an issue with the current Oneiric updates? some fixes for similar issues landed recently

[Swâmi Petaramesh (swami-petaramesh)]

Yes AND No.

With latest Oneiric updates as of right now (2011/10/12 16:07 UTC) :

- "xset q" shows DPMS active with all timeouts set to zero (where they previously were set to 600 before updates).

- Watching a movie (with the screen "fade to black" set to 30 minutes in control panel) :

1/ Previously the screen went off (suddenly) after 10 minutes - due to the DPMS timeout - This behaviour is now gone.

2/ But now the screen fades out to black after 30 minutes - as set per control panel.

=> With previous Ubuntu versions, watching a movie with Totem video player prevented/inhibited the screensaver to kick in and the screen to go black. It's not the case anymore so the regression is still there

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

Thank you for your bug report, so part of the issue got fixed which is something, we need to investigate know why totem doesn't inhibit the screensaver as it should