Smarter Screen saver

[Marius Gedminas]

On Thu, Sep 22, 2005 at 04:02:49PM -0400, Alvin Thompson wrote:
> On Thu, 2005-09-22 at 10:24 +0100, Thomas Beckett wrote:
> > The idea for the postpone time was that if the player did crash before
> > the film or whatever you are doing finishes then the resume signal
> > would not need to be issued, it would wake itself up.
> 
> i'm not a big fan of the "postpone time" concept. for one, it's quite
> possible that totem/whatever has no way of knowing the play time (like
> with a live stream). then, it would have to resort to sending a postpone
> every few minutes, which would be inelegant. also, why stop the screen
> saver for 2 hours when you had to kill the program at 2 minutes?

I find the idea of movie players postponing the screensaver for a few
minutes every few minutes quite elegant.  It handles both unexpected
crashes and early closing of the movie player.

BTW this is precisely what jwz recommends:
http://www.jwz.org/xscreensaver/faq.html#dvd

> instead of a postpone time, how about including the PID of the app
> sending the POSTPONE message? then, if that process ends without
> canceling the POSTPONE, the screen saver program knows to do so itself
> (for now, see below)?

X11 is a network protocol.  The screen saver may be running on a
different machine from the movie player.  And yes, I have actually used
this in real life (to get video on my laptop and audio on the speakers
connected to a desktop).

Marius Gedminas
-- 
There is an almost obvious extension of interfaces that would allow formal
specification of arguments and return values.  We suspect it leads to the dark
side.
	-- Jim Fulton
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