mplayer, dpms problem

[Kenny Gow]

Antonio Olivares wrote:
> Dear all,
>   I would like to kindly ask for your advice regarding
> an issue with mplayer.  I have the Gnome power control
> enabled to blank the screen after 2 minutes. 
> Previously, when playing films with mplayer the
> command 
> $ mplayer dvd:// -alang en -stop-xscreensaver 
> worked till the movie finished.  
> In Fedora Core 5 and the new inclusion of
> gnome-screensaver, this also worked.  However, with
> Core 6, mplayer plays the movie but dpms kicks in and
> blanks the screen.  How can I tell dpms not to kick in
> and allow mplayer to play the complete movie without
> blanking the screen?
> 
> I have tried to use
> $ xset -dpms and
> $ xset dpms off but
> Power Savings kicks in and monitor blanks after 2
> minutes.  I do not want to disable power savings on in
> Gnome Power Manager.  I want to find a viable
> solution.  Thank you for your time and advice.  
> 

I have had similar issues on FC5 and FC6.

My solution was to remove the gnome-screensaver package and
install the xscreensaver* packages like it was before. I left
gnome-power-manager installed but set it to Never. I used the
settings in xscreensaver properties to set the screensaver
blank time and the power management timeouts. I put
stop-xscreensaver=yes in my mplayer config file and all
worked fine to let mplayer play without blanking.

A little research led me to these links

http://lists.mplayerhq.hu/pipermail/mplayer-dev-eng/2004-October/030261.html
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?s=3a3df3f9dadb56551868b5ddbbafcf08&t=189051

which lead me to believe that the controlling settings always
end up coming from xscreensaver properties.

Regards,
Kenny