17

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?

Dave
  • 438

7 Answers7

12
  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.

enter image description here

Nitin Venkatesh
  • 22,739
5

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

Suhaib
  • 4,171
4

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.

dessert
  • 40,956
Mendhak
  • 4,530
1

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?"

dessert
  • 40,956
Evan Carroll
  • 7,703
1

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.

user43326
  • 111
1

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 }
AvImd
  • 33
  • 5
0

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

Alex
  • 1