[MPlayer-dev-eng] Question for dev's: Does mplayer disable DPMS timeouts? "xset q" looks good, but timeouts never trigger

[Ted Pavlic]

Mplayer devs --

	I'm sorry if this question doesn't belong here, but this seems to be
something that most users are clueless about.

	I've noticed that when mplayer (and ffplay, actually) is running, my
monitors never turn off even though "xset q" shows that DPMS is enabled
and timeouts are set correctly. I've toyed with nostop-xscreensaver and
heartbeat-cmd, but they don't seem to have anything to do with it.

	The popular fractal flame distributed computing screensaver
electricsheep uses mplayer to display its AVI files on Linux.
Consequently, whenever electricsheep runs, my monitors fail to ever
standby, suspend, and turn off.

	I did notice that I can "xset force dpms off" and the monitors stay off
despite mplayer being up and running (forcing suspend or standby doesn't
work; they pop back on). So I've written an electricsheep wrapper script
that periodically turns the monitors off via DPMS at regular intervals.
This is an OK stopgap solution, but it's not perfect.

	If mplayer is disabling the DPMS timeouts, is there any way to prevent
that? Or was the design decision made that no one would ever want DPMS
timeouts to trigger while playing video through mplayer?

	Thanks --
	Ted

-- 
Ted Pavlic <ted at tedpavlic.com>