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

Nicolas George nicolas.george at normalesup.org
Fri Sep 9 20:33:30 CEST 2011


Le duodi 22 fructidor, an CCXIX, Ivan Kalvachev a écrit :
> I think that DPMS should have its own option.
> 
> There are many buggy (intel) drivers that e.g. turn off the backlight
> when dpms is turned off. When workarounding such bug you'd want to be
> able to disable dpms and still stop the screensaver from jumping over
> your movie.

I was not aware of that problem (yet, I have several boxes with Intel
drivers and sometimes disabled DPMS), but it is indeed clearly an issue.

An additional option for DPMS would be pretty easy.

Is it possible to identify reliably the faulty drivers?

> (There is also a feature request, to have a mode where pausing a movie
> restores dpms & screensaver).

This should be pretty easy too, in fact. Currently, mplayer has two ways of
preventing the screen saver from obscuring the video:

- suspend it with XScreenSaverSuspend (which is the correct way to do it, as
  its effect is reset when the client exits), see xss_suspend in x11_common.

- reset the inactivity timer with XResetScreenSaver (potentially at each
  frame, but it is limited to only once each 30 seconds), see
  xscreensaver_heartbeat in x11_common.

Both are controlled by the same option, and, unless I am mistaken, both
should be enough to prevent non-bogus screen savers from obscuring a video.

Having only the second one should give you the feature you want.

The hard part is to decide of a way for the user to specify the mode he
wants. Having a zillion options is probably not the best way. Some kind of
flag mask may be the way to go.

Regards,

-- 
  Nicolas George
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