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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
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7 Answers7

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  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
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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
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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
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Mendhak
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    This worked for now. You can configure Caffeine to automatically start preventing the screensaver and powersaving whenever a particular program is running. To set this up, just run the program that should inhibit the screensaver, right-click on the Caffeine applet, select “Preferences”, and then click “Add”. You should see a list of all running processes in the pop-up window. Click the name of the program that you started earlier and click “Add”. Close the preferences window. – Dave Oct 20 '11 at 20:23
  • This doesn't seem to work on Ubuntu 16.04 – user43326 Jun 14 '18 at 17:00
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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
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Evan Carroll
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  • This has the same effect as the method in [that answer](https://askubuntu.com/a/69634/22949), doesn't it? (It's no problem if it does -- different answers that work through the same underlying mechanism are totally fine -- but if it is somehow different, then I think it may be best to mention that.) – Eliah Kagan Apr 28 '18 at 14:28
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    I don't think so. My answer does so without using a GUI and I don't have to go digging around options. When the GUI answers stops working, my answer will prevail. =) – Evan Carroll Apr 28 '18 at 15:29
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    Here is the funny thing: even though I had "Disable screensaver" enabled in the GUI of VLC, I opened up my vlcrc file, and the line was commented out. I commented it in, saved, started VLC, and VLC is *still* failing to disable the screensaver. – Mike Nakis Jun 15 '19 at 19:46
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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
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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
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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
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