[MPlayer-dev-eng] Make Mplayer and Xscreensaver play nice together

[Reimar Döffinger]

On Sat, Apr 09, 2011 at 03:02:15PM -0300, Boni Xavier wrote:
> I don't want to watch laggy movies because you guys don't want to play nice
> with each other.

All I want to say is that from my point the issue is that the screensaver
developers refuse to cooperate with each other even the slightest bit,
and some of them changing there API about once a year.
Until _they_ agree on a way to support _all_, current and future screensavers
with a reasonable number of code-paths I don't see value in even discussing
the subject really, also because I think it is unprofessional and disrespectful
behaviour towards application developers.
If you'd like a constructive suggestion: Make them develop a "libscreensaver"
that unifies all those countless methods with a most 3 different functions.
Though I expect a problem will be that they can't agree in behaviour:
Some think disabling should be done via on/off switch, some think it should
be done via heartbeat, some think it should be linked to a specific application,
others think it should be possible to do the disabling on behalf of a different
application.
My other suggestion to just make the screensave self-contained, e.g. it should
have a configure option that will make it not run e.g. whenever a binary with
a certain name runs, or whenever a window with a certain title is visible etc.
never raised any interest either.

> my movies, but I often go to bed while watching boring stuff so I have to
> stand my PC not suspending overnight because I fell asleep and didn't turn
> xscreensaver back on.
> 
> Unfortunately, I don't code, otherwise I'd be sending a patch right now.

There is something you can do: Write a script that disables xscreensaver,
runs mplayer, then enables xscreensaver again, i.e. (untested, if it works
it might be a good idea to add to the documentation)

#!/bin/sh
trap 'xscreensaver-command -activate' EXIT
xscreensaver-command -deactivate
mplayer "$@"