[mythtv-users] Mythfrontend doesn't restore screensaver if it crashes during playback

Mon Jul 25 19:13:25 UTC 2011

> Date: Sat, 23 Jul 2011 13:07:03 -0400
> From: mtdean at thirdcontact.com
> To: mythtv-users at mythtv.org
> Subject: Re: [mythtv-users] Mythfrontend doesn't restore screensaver if it crashes during playback
> 
> On 07/23/2011 09:08 AM, Yianni Vidalis wrote:
> > Maybe it's not a bug per se, but it is annoying. Mythfrontend 
> > disables, as expected, the screensaver and dpms settings before 
> > entering playback. If, for whatever reason, mythfrontend crashes 
> > during playback, when I re-run it it doesn't remember that it disabled 
> > those settings and the screensaver never kicks in.
> >
> > It would be very convenient to have a flag like "I disabled the 
> > screensaver" which could be checked upon startup so that it would 
> > re-enable it at initialisation.
> >
> 
> mythfrontend never disables screen savers for /exactly/ this reason.  
> Instead, mythfrontend "pokes" the (supported) screensaver every 50s 
> during playback to keep it from activating.
> 
> Your screen saver (which I would assume is KDE screensaver, since we 
> directly support xscreensaver and GNOME screensaver and don't directly 
> support KDE screensaver***) is disabling itself because we changed the 
> DPMS value (because we didn't find a "supported" screensaver running.

Yes, it is a KDE(4) screensaver. Actually, it's just a blank screen with DPMS activating afterwards.
> 
> The best "fix" for the issue you noticed is for mythfrontend to use a 
> standard desktop utility that manages screensaver state--xdg-screenaver 
> ( http://portland.freedesktop.org/xdg-utils-1.0/xdg-screensaver.html ) 
> of the xdg-utils package ( http://portland.freedesktop.org/wiki/ )--so 
> that if mythfrontend crashes, the external utility will properly 
> re-enable the screensaver.
> 
> Johnny Walker actually wrote a patch that added xdg-screensaver support 
> to MythTV, and I put it in (before 0.24), but once people started using 
> it, we found out that xdg-screensaver failed on several systems 
> (including both KDE and GNOME screensaver based systems).  So, I ripped 
> out the xdg-screensaver support (also before 0.24), debugged 
> xdg-screensaver, and submitted 3 patches to fix it.  1 patch of the 3, 
> the one that fixes GNOME screensaver support to work using a better 
> design than the one that was in xdg-screensaver, has been incorporated 
> into the master/development branch (and is not in the 1.1.0-rc1 
> "release").  The 2 that are required to fix KDE screensaver (the one 
> screensaver we don't directly support in mythfrontend--that instead 
> takes its own cues off our flipping the DPMS state of the display) 
> haven't yet been applied.

I was one of the people affected negatively by the patch By Johnny Walker (15 minutes of watching and then... darkness!) Thanks for reverting it. 

> 
> Until freedesktop fixes xdg-screensaver, we can't use xdg-screensaver in 
> MythTV.  As soon as a version of xdg-screensaver is released with the 
> fixes, I will restore the xdg-screensaver support, but with a version 
> test to make sure the version installed is current enough to use.
>
I'll be glad to test it, I'm using master, anyway, so things are supposed to break ;)
> Unfortunately, though, GNOME and KDE developers seem to be vehemently 
> opposed to the idea of a single desktop utility that controls any 
> screensaver the user might choose to run (and does the right thing when 
> complex apps like mythfrontend crash)--even to the point of designing 
> the API for their screensavers to be less-than-friendly to the idea.  
> Developers in both camps have said that any application that wants to 
> interface with the screensaver should have its own code specifically for 
> disabling their particular screensaver--so they want us to add code for 
> xscreensaver and KDE screensaver and GNOME screensaver and 
> no-screensaver-but-DPMS-only (and xlockmore and ...), and to update all 
> that code (and somehow push the updates out to the users who get the 
> updated versions of the screensavers) as the screensaver changes or the 
> API is extended or ...  (As an outsider looking in, it seems like these 
> guys have never heard of Unix-style design.  Then again, I may just be 
> misinterpreting the statements I've seen from them.)
> 
> Sorry for the rant, but I'm still very upset with the DE developers idea 
> of how things should work.
> 
> Mike
> 
> *** Note, also, that just switching your system to use the GNOME 
> screensaver may not work, either, because some versions of GNOME 
> screensaver were shipped with broken gnome-screensaver-command--which 
> means that our poke is not working on those systems.  Switching to 
> xscreensaver, however, should make everything work properly--even in the 
> event of a crash of mythfrontend.
Oh, no, no, no, I've been using KDE ever since I started using Linux seriously. That and SuSE, and I don't want to change distro or desktop. I've tried GNOME but it just doesn't feel 'right' to me. And NO, I am not trying to start a flame war or something. I guess it's just a matter of opinion.
Mike, thank you for taking the time to answer me. Your posts are always educational (I hope I'm not using too strong a word). Everytime I read something of yours I know a little more about this program.
Yianni.> _______________________________________________
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