The "heartbeat-cmd" option solves the problem, but the "xscreensaver-command -deactivate" command may be a little slow and prejudice mplayer performance:
If so, try niceing the program:
The signal is still sent to xscreensaver, but it doesn't get in the way.

I know this is an old thread but I just wanted to say thanks for the information as was just looking for a fix as Xine isn't working currently on my Fedora 15 setup so having to default back to mplayer (which is not my first choice).

This did the trick; although maybe inclinded to checkout making the program nice

I don't get the performance deficite as in what actually degrades but will keep the latter in mind perhaps as comment within the mplayer/config file.

For disable kernel screensaver I used this order

Isn't it just better to let mplayer do it as per the OP's request?


I mean I set my screensaver for 15 minutes turn black then off after another 15.

Of course this is during normal run, however, when playing vidoes I want it to be disabled but since I am lazy to run Mplayer from the CLI as my video+directory names can be quite long; I prefer to have mplayer turn the screensaver off for me when run from Thunar (XFCE file manager).

This is actually per the original intent of this thread which is what I also was after :)

If you use the GUI there is an option to disable xscreensaver. Not sure if this helps but that's all I can offer.

The difference is doing that will completely disable xscreensaver while the OP only wants it to be disables while MPlayer is running.

Should it be: heartbeat-cmd = "nice xscreensaver-command -deactivate & >/dev/null" ?

personally I use this is my .bashrc
slightly modified from gentoo's hints.

I use a simpler solution: use xdotool to emulate pressing ctrl key every 30 seconds. This has almost no impact on Mplayer performance as opposed to "xscreensaver-command -deactivate" method.

Put this to ~/.mplayer/config (requires xdotool installed):
heartbeat-cmd="xdotool key ctrl"

When you say 'Mplayer performace' what exactly are you referring to?

I have been using the command I posted above since my last post (yesterday) but haven't noticed anything on straight playback of video files even HD ones or any CPU overhead.

I know am using a different distro to Slackware as mine is Fedora 15, and I also understand that am in the Slackware path of the forums but still..... my initial post did apply and was a thankyou note rather then: "this aint workin' on my distro" note.

In my case, I had a very noticeable freeze every 30 seconds using "xscreensaver-command -deactivate"

Ah ok.

Thanks for that.

I haven't noticed anything like that but then I've activated H/W acceleration on my system so mplayer is using very little CPU.

The majority of the processing gets done on the GPU itself.

The only thing that worked for me (Slackware13.37, KDE) was adding:
to ~/.mplayer/config.