After upgrading Plasma, VLC no longer prevents screen from sleeping

General system EndeavourOS installation
1

Hi all,

After upgrading Plasma yesterday, VLC no longer prevents screen from turning off after the configured 30 minutes.

I’ve searched the internet but all posts about this problem are at least two years ago and mostly about Windows.

2

You applied the changes to plugin split packages?

3

If you’re referring to the update from 12th of Juli, I guess so. I update quite often, once a week at least and didn’t have problems until yesterday, when plasma had a big update.

$ LANG=C pacman -Ss vlc-plugin | grep installed | wc -l
36

Should I be looking for a specific plugin? dbus plugin is installed…

4

Have you checked if KDE is registering the VLC as sleep inhibitor during playback?

Run this while VLC is playing

busctl --user call org.kde.Solid.PowerManagement.PolicyAgent /org/kde/Solid/PowerManagement/PolicyAgent org.kde.Solid.PowerManagement.PolicyAgent ListInhibitions

It should show something like this if it’s working

a(ss) 1 "vlc" "Playing some media."

That said, I’ve encountered some strange issues if the player is not in full screen mode during playback, sometimes the inhibition will not register, sometimes it will. In full screen mode it worked correctly every time.

2 Likes
5

I’ve checked it and it shows vlc. At the same time, the screen stays on for now. I’ll have a look at it if the issue comes back.

It would’ve suggested an issue with vlc, but I didn’t find any report on its bug tracker.

Thank you anyway for the hint.

6

Might it be related to another problem that sometimes happens with firefox / librewolf: if I start it soon after logging in, sometimes it doesn’t respond to mouse gestures. I know some input is also done with dbus, so perhaps some related dbus component starts too late for vlc and librewolf to register themselves?

7

You may changed session from X11 to Wayland ?
VLC could still have issues running on Wayland.
Something like using:
‘xdg-screensaver suspend $(pgrep -n vlc)’
Would be to check…

8

Nah, I’m pretty sure I’ve been running Wayland since I’ve installed EOS

xdg-screensaver: Window 58064 does not exist

The problem is it’s ephemeral, now it consistently works, even tho I didn’t change anything.

9

just had a “minute” and tested and here it does properly prevent screensaving even in window mode. not tested before so could be another update resveld it again ..

10

and yes this is not really working only was an idea.. but probably a bit half-baked

11

So I have the following problems that might be related, but I either didn’t make a connection or didn’t appear until recently:

  • sometimes in JetBrains cursor starts going right (or sometimes left, and once pg down) after changing windows with alt-tab. Not sure how long it happens, probably since before I’ve switched to EOS. I’ve reported it to JetBrains but they couldn’t help

  • Similar problem appeared recently in VLC, right arrow caused playback to jump forward

  • Often pressing mute key (fn+f1) behaves as if held and switches back and forth - mute and um-mute. Less often changing volume behaves the same way

  • Often firefox, when started shortly after logging in doesn’t support mouse gestures. Restarting it fixes it.

I’ve searched for keyboard problems on lenovo but I could only find keys or keyboard not working.

LLM suggests it’s a problem with handling input events in kwin.

Lenovo E15 Gen2

12

Is it possible that the registration expires and is not renewed?