xscreensaver does not respect disable screensaver suppression of applications

[sander]

In Ubuntu 13.10 xscreensaver worked perfectly. After upgrading to 14.04, the screensaver shows up while watching movies in both the default Videos application and in Vlc. In both these applications, the option to disable the screensaver while watching a movie is enabled.

When entering in a command screen the following command, the screensaver stays away:

watch -n 10 -t xscreensaver-command -deactivate

As the xscreensaver package in Ubuntu 13.10 and 14.04 is exactly the same version, and because this bug shows up in both Vlc and the default Videos application, I suspect a bug in another application is interferring with the communication so that xscreensaver does not receive idle timer reset signals from Vlc/Videos/...

Can this be fixed? Is there a fast workaround for this annoying bug? (At the moment, I just disabled the nice Noflipglo clock screensaver on my living room computer)

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

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

[G.M. (sexxxenator)]

Hi,

I'm hitting the same bug.

For more information, I'm using the trick given in mplayer's man page to prevent xscreensaver to run while watching a movie:
mplayer -heartbeat-cmd "xscreensaver-command -deactivate" file

When playing a movie, I see the following message repeated regularly (I imagine every 10 minutes, since it's the delay for the heartbeat, by I've not verified that):
xscreensaver-command: not active: idle timer reset.

Might be the same problem as: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/xscreensaver/+bug/926064 ?