I am using Ubuntu 11.10 and my screensaver keeps coming on while I'm watching a movie. I don't remember this happening in 11.04 and can't remember how to stop it?

0

7 Answers

1. Open VLC Media player and go to Tools -> Preferences (Shortcut key is CtrlP)
2. Select All from Show settings in the bottom-left corner of the Preferences window .
3. Now click the Video Tab on the side.
4. Now tick the Disable Screensaver box and click save.

3

Another solution but not what you want is:

Open the terminal and type:

xset s off

This will disable the screensaver.

to enable it again

xset s on

---

There are other options such as disabling for a period of time etc..

Type man xset in the terminal for more info

I've seen this happening with VLC as well as Banshee. The only solution I could find is to run Caffeine.

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:caffeine-developers/ppa
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install caffeine

After that, run caffeine, go to its preferences and have it start on login. It sits in your system tray. Whenever you then watch a movie, you'll need to click on its system tray icon and select 'disable screensaver'.

It is not the best solution but it is the only one I can see in these early days.

2

From my answer on Unix.SE, you can simply run,

echo "disable-screensaver=0" >> ~/.config/vlc/vlcrc

For more information see "When using VLC, why does my screen saver keep waking up?"

3

Expanding on this answer, one can type

xset s on; vlc; xset s off;

from a terminal to launch vlc, or write a bash script

#!/bin/bash
xset s on; vlc; xset s off;

or a desktop file whose command is something like

set s on; vlc %U; xset s off;

and set the association file/mimetype to it to open appropriate mimetypes. "%U" works for TDE, for other desktops, you might need to find the right syntax.

In case you are using xscreensaver and the GUI options do not help, you can use the following funciton to run VLC from the command line:

vlc() { xscreensaver-command -exit; command vlc "$@"; nohup xscreensaver -no-splash } 

I made a script which can close xscreensaver when VLC is open, and even closes redshift (eye protector app) when it exists.

You can try it from here:Close-Screensaver-Redshift-when-VLC-opened-Script

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