[MPlayer-dev-eng] [PATCH] Activating/Deactivating of XScreenSaver

[D Richard Felker III]

On Sun, Jun 02, 2002 at 01:43:49AM +0200, Diego Biurrun wrote:
> Since xscreensaver is used for locking the screen, a crashing mplayer
> can be a security hole, because the screen will not be locked again
> and the user is probably not aware of this.

Leaving your console logged in when it's not already locked is a
security hole to begin with. If you're using locking for serious
security, you should make sure the screensaver/locker is already
engaged (by manually starting or activating it or whatever) before
getting up from your seat. Thus I don't think the security argument
here is valid.

> This is my pet peeve, too, and a very nice feature, I believe.  Movie
> players should disable screensavers.

Or perhaps screensavers should disable themselves when a movie player
is running. How hard would it be to patch xscreensaver to check for
the existence of certain windows/clients and not enable screensaver as
long as they are present? Such a feature could be user-configurable
with sane defaults including Xine, MPlayer, aviplay, etc. IMO this
makes a lot more sense than requiring every movie player to know the
special way to properly disable/suspend every screensaver (xlock,
xlockmore, xscreensaver, ... are there more?).

Rich