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

[Ivan Kalvachev]

On 4/9/11, Reimar Döffinger <Reimar.Doeffinger at gmx.de> wrote:
> 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 "$@"

Reimar,
http://portland.freedesktop.org/xdg-utils-1.0/xdg-screensaver.html

It is kind of similar to the heartbeat method and probably the code
could be reused.
Not sure about passing the window id parameter (and how it would
handle the case when we have (no)fixed-vo).

The script I have on my system seems to try gnome, kde, dbus, xset,
xscreensaver methods.