Mouse pointer intermittently appears when watching videos with mplayer

[pickledfish]

Hi. I think this should be simple to fix but I can't find an answer.
The problem is that I reinstalled mplayer and now the mouse pointer appears on the screen every few minutes. It only appears for a second and disappears again. Not a major problem but annoying.
I'm assuming it's only a matter of adding something to the mplayer conf file to fix this? Any help would be much appreciated.

[miau1010]

I'm having this same problem.

[Stason]

Menu (or right click) ==> Video ==> Stay on top ==> While playing


This would hide the pointer, which pops up when the "disable screensaver" script moves the mouse every now and then.

[papibe]

That didn't do it for me. Not even "Always on top".
Any other idea?

Regards.

[wilee-nilee]

If you bump the mouse or it gets a vibration it will show.

[andree_b]

It's a bug in mplayer... installing mplayer from smplayer PPA fixed it for me in 9.10.
(mplayer moves the mousepointer randomly to disable mousepointer)

But sadly in 10.04 the mplayer internal disable-screensaver stuff did not work anymore and i had to add heartbeat-cmd stuff to mplayer.conf to keep the screensaver disabled.

[papibe]

But sadly in 10.04 the mplayer internal disable-screensaver stuff did not work anymore and i had to add heartbeat-cmd stuff to mplayer.conf to keep the screensaver disabled.

Did it work? Would you share how?
Regards.

[LowSky]

you can install unclutter

[papibe]

@ LowSky: thanks, I tried unclutter, but it didn't do the job. Since mplayer itself keeps moving the mouse, unclutter never engages. May be playing with the -jitter option could have worked.

I went andree_b's way. I unchecked the "Disable screensaver" option (smplayer), and I add this line to my ~/.mplayer/config

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

It's working now ):P , that is: mouse is not visible after a few seconds, and the screen saver does not start.

:rolleyes: Obs: the screen saver's idle setting has to be > 1 minute.

Regards.

[andree_b]

or if you use xscreensaver instead of gnome-screensaver:
heartbeat-cmd="xscreensaver-command -deactivate &"
Without the "&" (sending command to background) i experienced small stutter everytime the command executed

[jyavenard]

add the following to your xorg.conf device section:

Option "HWCursor" "false"

Or in nvidia-settings, disable the hardware mouse pointer acceleration