mplayer and vlc causes backlight to go to full brightness

[Alastair M. Robinson]

Binary package hint: mplayer

I have an HP/Compaq 6720s laptop with Ubuntu Hardy, which is up to date.

Running mplayer or vlc to play a video seems to mess with the backlight brightness setting - I usually have it a few stops down from maximum, but both when the video starts playing, and again when the video window closes, the backlight brightness is cranked up to maximum.

This doesn't happen with either Totem or gxine, however.

This happens in both fullscreen and windowed mode with most of the video output modes. I've checked mplayer with x11, xv, sdl and gl backends and it happens with all of these. (With the aa backend it doesn't, however!)

Possibly related, but the brightness isn't saved, as it used to be in Gutsy - I now have to adjust the brightness every time I log in.

[Mingming Ren (portis25)]

On my Fujitsu Siemens Amilo Pi 2515 laptop, it's the opposite of what described above. That is, it turns the brightness to the lowest, whenever I run mplayer, vlc, or even virtualbox!

[Alastair M. Robinson (robinsonb5)]

I've tracked this down to mplayer's disabling of DPMS while playing a movie, which means the bug is in the DPMS portion of the X server.

To confirm this:
a) in mplayer-1.0~rc2/config.h change
#define HAVE_XDPMS 1
to
#undef HAVE_XDPMS
and rebuild - problem goes away (along with DPMS disabling capability, of course)

b) xset -dpms
exhibits the same behaviour.

[tim_o (tle)]

I can confirm this bug with the Ubuntu 8.04 release candidate.

When playing a movie in VLC, the backlight on my laptop goes to full brightness.

[reacocard (reacocard)]

I also have this issue, on a Thinkpad T60 with Intel X3100 graphics. It happens with vlc, mplayer, and some games as well. I can additionally confirm that 'xset -dpms' also exhibits this behaviour, indicating that this issue resides in X's treatment of DPMS.

[X-Stranger (xstranger)]

The same for me using HP/Compaq 6720s laptop with Ubuntu Hardy, which is up to date

[Tv (tv42)]

This is pretty much the same bug as #201544, just talking about brightness going the other way.
#201544 was reported earlier so I marked this one as duplicate.