Preventing display sleep while running pipelight?

Asked by Sean Fitzpatrick

With the netflix-desktop application from ehoover's compholio repository, I can watch movies on Netflix and the program will override my system setting to put the display to sleep after 30 minutes of inactivity; I'm guessing this has something to do with using the Windows version of Firefox. Using Pipelight instead to access Netflix through a native browser, my display will go to sleep 30 minutes into whatever I'm watching.
For shows that use Flash player the Caffiene app will automatically keep the display on, but there is no option for Silverlight (understandably). Is there some way to get Caffiene to recognize Pipelight (without having it prevent sleep whenever a browswer is open) or some other recommended workaround?

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Pipelight Edit question
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Solved by:
Michael Müller
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Best Michael Müller (mqchael) said :
#1

Hi,

we already have a bug report for this problem: https://bugs.launchpad.net/pipelight/+bug/1265941 and there was some initial work on this by my side. The problem is that the way how a screensaver can be controlled heavily depends on the used screensaver / desktop environment and there is no common solution to this problem. Netflix desktop simply disables the screensaver as long as the Firefox browser is open and only if the screensaver is gnome based / supports the according gnome commands. This won't work for example on LXDE with xscreensaver.

My solution to this problem was a bash script which is started when a plugin goes to fullscreen mode and which gets a SIGTERM signal as soon as it leaves it again (if you have multiple monitors with multiple fullscreen plugins the script is not started multiple times). The script should then detect the used screensaver and prevent it from starting. Anyway, the other developers didn't like this idea as it requires an additional process and therefore we don't have any solution at the moment.

I would suggest you to subscribe to the bug report mentioned above, to get more information when there is a better solution for the problem.

Michael

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Sean Fitzpatrick (sean-fitzpatrick) said :
#2

Thanks Michael, I'll keep an eye on the bug report. I'm using Unity as my DE so I have the built-in Gnome behaviour (i.e. just shutting off the screen). I might try playing with caffiene (contrary to the bug report) to see if I can get it to recognize the Pipelight plugin.

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Sean Fitzpatrick (sean-fitzpatrick) said :
#3

Thanks Michael Müller, that solved my question.