On Tue, 19 Apr 2022, Jamie Zawinski wrote: Never got around to replying to this, sorry, although I did submit bugs to firefox.
> > Only problem is I'm not playing a video. Unfortunately, the net is full of > > ads, so pretty much every page claims to be "playing a video". > > Yeah, that's awesome, isn't it? I had been under the impression that the bug > you are describing only happened with Chromium, not with Firefox. Here's an > excerpt from the tragically-long comment at the top of xscreensaver-systemd.c: > > * Twitter (and many other sites) auto-convert GIFs to looping MP4s to > * save bandwidth. Chromium inhibits the screen saver any time a Twitter > * GIF is on screen (either in the browser or in Tweetdeck). > * > * The proper way for Chrome to fix this would be to stop inhibiting once > * the video loops. That way your multi-hour movie inhibits properly, but > * your looping GIF only inhibits for the first few seconds. In my case, it's culprits like https://theage.com.au, which are full of ads and occasional auto-looping videos/gifs, combined with a 5ish minute auto-reload. So the screensaver would be poked every 5 minutes regardless of such a fix. > Firefox, Chrome and Chromium also all will leave the screen permanently > inhibiited if they crash, too, which is great. Not sure that's the case - xdg-screensaver takes a windowid, and I'm pretty sure I tested that when that windowid disappears due to crash, the lock is released. > And Firefox, Chromium and MPV inhibit screen blanking when only *audio* is > playing, which makes no damned sense at all. This audio aspect has finally been addressed, I believe, in firefox - my original bug, which got auto-routed to the wrong component, "fixed", then closed: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1749187 A clone of that properly routed, dealing with the video component, hasn't been acknowledged yet: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=188526 (firefox 1744641 deals with the stupid "human readable" text string simply reading: "Playing video" or "video-playing" rather than something useful) However, I don't know whether it's a result of one of my recent changes to my own screensaver setup, a lack of me opening pages that embed auto-looping video, or an undocumented change somewhere between firefox 115.15.0esr-1~deb12u1 and current 128.3.1esr-1~deb12u1, but my the logfiles for my workaround for this bug show this had stopped affecting me sometime recently (I had been running xscreensaver under a watchdog that monitors for "inhibited by" | grep "$prohibited_items" per my config here: https://github.com/spacelama/ansible-initial-server-setup/blob/master/files/homes.desktop/bin/runxscreensaver-monitor ) -- Tim Connors
