VLC screen goes black, but no screensaver is active

**dargaud** · March 14th, 2013

Hello all,
something annoying and contradictory happens on my old laptop (kubuntu). I've disabled all screensaver and screen power options: the laptop/screen never goes to sleep/dark. But when I use VLC to watch a movie, the screen goes black every 10 minutes (moving the mouse wakes it up alright).

I've looked over the options of VLC ten times and don't see anything relating to this minor but annoying issue.
Any idea ?
Thanks.

**TiberiusT** · March 14th, 2013

I had the same problem here on Xubuntu 12.10 x64. I traced it down to DPMS (some kind of TV out power save feature I think....) and following this thread

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2059551

I did this

HTML Code:

xset s off && xset dpms force on && xset -dpms &&

I then set that line to run on startup and set all and every power off/suspend/screensaver to 2 hrs. That way users can watch a movie. Any other setting and users were in the 10 minute zone - there shud be another way but I couldn't find it.

T

**dargaud** · March 17th, 2013

Nice try but it didn't change anything. The thing is that it used to work as expected (suspend computer after 15 minutes and VLC would keep it from suspending), but at a certain point I started to have those random dark screens in VLC, and at another muddled time the computer started refusing to go in sleep mode by itself, only when the [Sleep] button would be pressed. Any other idea ?