Prevent screen locking while watching videos

Question

elementary locks the screen after about 15 minutes of "inactivity", except the activity I'm doing is watching videos (no keyboard or mouse inputs during that lapse).

Site in question is Crunchyroll (uses flash plugin) running on Chromium in fullscreen mode on a secondary display (a 720p TV) via HDMI. AdBlock activated.

Behavior: right in the middle of an episode (12 to 15 minutes) the TV screen suddenly goes No Input. Main display (laptop screen) shows Login screen. Upon entering my password, video resumes.

My workaround to this is that I randomly move the mouse from time to time.

Should I do anything special to prevent screen/session locking?

Answer 1

lightsOn

There is a litte bash script called lightsOn on GitHub, which automatically checks on various apps, including fullscreen Flash and html5 video. (It works for me.)

Bash script managing screensaver and display power management (DPMS) on different conditions (fullscreen videos, specific applications, specific outputs).

To use the program save the file lightsOn.sh in your home directory, make it executable by typing chmod +x ~/lightsOn.sh and run it ~/lightsOn.sh 300 (this will check every 300 seconds = 5 minutes).

If it works you can add the script to startup by adding ~/lightsOn.sh 300 in System Settings > Applications > Startup.

---

The script detects a variety of apps / usages, you can configure (among other options) detecting certain things right in the shell script:

# Modify these variables if you want this script to detect if MPV, Mplayer,
# VLC, Minitube, Totem or a web browser Flash/HTML5 Video.
mplayer_detection=1
mpv_detection=1
vlc_detection=1
totem_detection=1
firefox_flash_detection=1
firefox_html5_detection=1
chromium_flash_detection=1
chromium_html5_detection=1
chromium_pepper_flash_detection=1
chrome_pepper_flash_detection=1
chrome_html5_detection=1
opera_flash_detection=1
opera_html5_detection=1
yandexBrowser_html5_flash_detection=1
epiphany_html5_detection=1
webkit_flash_detection=1
minitube_detection=1

Answer 2

Try to use Caffeine.

A status bar application able to temporarily prevent the activation of both the screensaver and the "sleep" powersaving mode.

Install:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:caffeine-developers/ppa 
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install caffeine

EDIT: Currently, this method doesn't work on Freya.

Answer 3

The following commands do the job of using lightsOn :

mkdir -p ~/scripts && cd ~/scripts
wget https://raw.github.com/hotice/lightsOn/master/lightsOn.sh
chmod +x lightsOn.sh

By default, the script works with Firefox and Chromium, but you can also enable it for VLC or mplayer. To do this, open the "lightsOn.sh" file and modify the "mplayer_detection" and/or "vlc_detection" from 0 to 1.

To run the script: Open terminal and run-

~/scripts/lightsOn.sh

To get the script to run each time your computer starts, you can add it to the startup applications.

Reference here

Answer 4

The best way I found it for every Linux system is:

• Open VLC
• Play and pause any video you have
• Reduce to icon
• Then you can view every streaming video without start the screensaver

This is the best way and more simple instead use some useless scripts.

This feature need to come with browsers and not with additional scripts/apps.