McEs, A Hacker Life: The weirdest bug

Saturday, July 09, 2005

The weirdest bug

This definitely is worth copying here:

Bastien Nocera wrote:

> We definitely need a way to have a poke at the screensaver so that it
> doesn't get enabled without resorting to the current fake key events
> hacks.

Ah...
And for two years I thought its the weirdest bug of all software that
when running xine and switching windows using alt+tab, I get my
keyboard language changed once in a while... And that after once
running gok, running xine brings up a "you pressed shift too many
times, do you need any help" dialog that I don't even know how to
turn off... And that running xine brings the Typing Break screen
lock up every 20 minutes even when I don't touch the mouse and
keyboard... What I didn't know is that it was all to free me
from turning off the screensaver when watching movies...that I do
anyway, since mplayer doesn't have this "feature" of sending fake
key events... sigh

¶ 12:11 PM

Comments:

Use mplayer -stop-screensaver

# posted by

Anonymous : July 09, 2005 12:52 PM

Or... you could jettison skanky old mplayer and get the xine-backed Totem, which Just Works, as expected. =)

# posted by

Anonymous : July 09, 2005 1:54 PM

The correct option should be "stop-xscreensaver", you can add a line in your .mplayer/config file as "stop-xscreensaver = 1" and forget about it... =)

# posted by

Anonymous : July 10, 2005 2:28 AM

Make sure everyone involved reads http://www.jwz.org/xscreensaver/faq.html#dvd

... in which JWZ describes exactly how this should be done.

# posted by

Anonymous : July 10, 2005 8:17 AM

Thanks for all the responses. mplayer -stop-xscreensaver comes handy, I surely will set that to be default.

About using Totem instead of mplayer, I'm afraid it doesn't work. I regularly deal with files that either xine cannot play, or mplayer, and the other one can. mplayer is based on the Unix philosophy to some extent, it's a command line application I can use in pipelines. It dumps streams in the easiest way, it writes out useful information about the media file type, etc, etc.

BTW, please note that, my complaint was about the bad behavior from xine, not mplayer.

# posted by

behdad : July 12, 2005 2:25 PM

Sily xine lovers...xine sucks

# posted by

Anonymous : November 16, 2005 11:08 AM

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