[MPlayer-users] mplayer and screen savers

[Reimar Döffinger]

On Fri, Sep 06, 2013 at 05:53:35PM +0200, Matus UHLAR - fantomas wrote:
> >Matus UHLAR - fantomas <uhlar at fantomas.sk> writes:
> >>the funny part is that when xscreensaver is not running, it works as
> >>expected, while some time ago it was the opposite (OK with
> >>xscreensaver, wrong without it).
> 
> On 06.09.13 08:33, Charles Philip Chan wrote:
> >Did you forget to put:
> >
> >   heartbeat-cmd="xscreensaver-command -deactivate &"
> >
> >in your mplayer.conf file?
> 
> forget? Since when is this needed and why doesn't "-stop-xscreensaver" work
> for disabling xscreensaver?
> 
> ... aha. Now I see in the 1.0rc5 changelog:
> 
>     * reworked screensaver disabling support, most users will need to use
>       -heartbeat-cmd due to screensaver authors failing to design a common
>       -API
> 
> I wonder if presence of xscreensaver couldn't be avoided the old way if its
> present...

There were quite a few methods, not all were working, etc., and most
importantly I kind of expected the xscreensaver would (at least at some
point) support at least ONE of the X APIs SPECIFICALLY DESIGNED FOR THE PURPOSE.
MPlayer to this day still uses XResetScreenSaver and
XScreenSaverSuspend, but as far as I can tell all screensaver developers
simply refused to support it and invented their own (in some cases
non-portable, OS-specific) method.
Since that disaster I find it hard to say anything but: just don't use a
screensaver, alternatively ask them to provide a way to configure it
properly (e.g. "if program name is MPlayer and CPU usage > 1%, disable
screensaver" would work almost perfectly and not require us to mess up
our code just because they do not want to support a sane API).