Disable gnome-screensaver while using mplayer

Just a quick post about an ignoring problem I had with Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty): I am a big fan of mplayer and it is the only player that can play 720p HD movie smoothly without having CPU running at top speed (2 GHz) on my 3.5 years old laptop (Thinkpad T43). However starting with 9.04, the screensaver keeps coming up while mplayer is playing — I don’t remember this uses to happen. I have stop-xscreensaver="yes" inside ~/.mplayer/config but this seems not doing the trick.

After checking the manual of mplayer, I managed to work this around by putting

heartbeat-cmd="gnome-screensaver-command -p"

into the config file. The heart beat command will run every 30 seconds, and gnome-screensaver-command -p will poke the screen saver daemon to let it know we are still up to something (not idle).

Note: maybe it is all because I’m using the latest svn version of mplayer packaged on a PPA — too lazy to test with the original version from Ubuntu’s repo for the time being, please leave a comment if you are using the latter and this doesn’t affect you, thanks.