[Linux] Usage of org.freedesktop.ScreenSaver for generic idle inhibit on Wayland?

[Mershl]

Description

Latest mpv is reporting "GNOME's wayland compositor lacks support for the idle inhibit protocol. This means the screen can blank during playback." while running on GNOME wayland.

mpv/video/out/wayland_common.c

Line 1730 in 2d34898

MP_WARN(wl, "GNOME's wayland compositor lacks support for the idle inhibit protocol. This means the screen can blank during playback.\n");

Other apps started using the org.freedesktop.ScreenSaver interface as an generic way to support idle inhibit. Could this also be a candidate for mpv?

[CounterPillow]

mpv will not add support for dbus garbage.

There's an open MR on GNOME's side for the non-dbus-garbage method of idle inhibition: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/merge_requests/111

[Deminder]

Until that MR is done this might be useful to some other flatpak users: (besides myself 🙂 )
I wrote a lua script as a workaround using gnome-session-inhibit to only inhibit when unpaused. This is for the io.mpv.Mpv flatpak app but this can be easily adapted for non-flatpak as well.

flatpak override --user --talk-name=org.gnome.SessionManager io.mpv.Mpv && curl -o ~/.var/app/io.mpv.Mpv/config/mpv/scripts/inhibit-screensaver.lua https://gist.githubusercontent.com/Deminder/6839fad736865cb3acabab409f9b09a1/raw/5c7d606733074aed8de3e542743229852fc34337/inhibit-with-heartbeat.lua

(this is better than just blindly inhibiting with an alias as suggested in #7713)

[ssokolow]

For the record, I downvoted the "dbus garbage" comment because I'm a KDE+MPV user who refuses to install "GNOME garbage".

The D-Bus API is intended to be a cross-desktop standard (that's why it begins with org.freedesktop.) and I don't want Zenity vs. KDialog vs. etc. all over again... let alone the state of things in X11, where it's a total crapshoot.

(I have to manually turn off screensaver inhibiting in a specialized MPV wrapper for playing stuff I fall asleep to or my tool for tracking my sleep cycle can't tell real activity apart from MPV's faked input events.)

[redhat421]

I ran into this same issue on KDE under Wayland on Fedora 39. KDE didn't notice a video playing in mpv and thus didn't trigger presentation mode.

I forked a version of mpv-freedesktop-screensaver-plugin.c and added it as an mpv plugin. This worked perfectly to inhibit power management and the screensaver / lock.

I thinking of packaging up the plugin and distributing it like mpv-mpris.

P.S. mpv is super great! Thanks for the hard (and often thankless) work maintaining such an excellent player. :-D