I suppose that this is a wishlist item for additional functionality, but I experienced screensaver activation on SuSE 10.1 with kaffeine 0.8.3.

Ideal behavior would be to suppress screensaver activity while videos are playing, but to turn it back on when the video is stopped, paused, or looping a DVD's opening menu screen.  Obviously, nobody wants the screensaver to activate in the middle of a TV show or movie.

I just can confirm that the screensaver / DMPS supression by a fake keystroke is not available anymore in 0.8.4. Has it been omitted on purpose? Until yesterday it worked with 0.8.3 with SuSE 10.1.

Fake key presses are still used in 0.8.4 - but only if you don't use the kde windowmanager. If the kde windowmanager is detected at runtime XWarpPointer is used because it does the same job (unfortunately it doesn't work with other screen savers :-/), but there aren't any interferences anymore (like konqueror autoscrolling, sticky keys etc).

You have to compile kaffeine with XTest support to get fake key presses ...

I have Kaffeine 0.8.5 compiled with XTest, and I'm using KDE 3.5.7 on Gentoo. Whenever I play a video (mp4, avi, mkv, no matter what) the screen saver is activated after 3 minutes (my setting for KDE).

On my computer screensaver kicks in only after this:
1) I open another KDE session
2) I change res to 1024x768
3) I run Kaffeine
4) I switch mode from xv to xshm
5) I load movie with subtitles

Oddly enough, it "works" only once per boot, so I am not sure what is the key step here.

KDE 3.5.7, Kaffeine 0.8.4.

On many Linux distributions Kaffeine is not able to find Xtest libraries and, in addition, it searches for an unexistent package file xtst.pc; in my case (Slackware 11 + Xorg 6.9.x), this happens with kaffeine 0.8.5 too.
I have found a workaround that works very well.

First of all, I edit configure and change

-----------------------------------------------------
# Check whether --with-xtest was given.
if test "${with_xtest+set}" = set; then
  withval=$with_xtest;
else
  with_xtest=yes
fi


CFLAGS_XTEST=""
LIB_XTEST=""

if test "$with_xtest" != "no" ; then
	{ echo "$as_me:$LINENO: checking for XTest extension" >&5
echo $ECHO_N "checking for XTest extension... $ECHO_C" >&6; }

	if "$PKG_CONFIG" --exists xtst ; then
		with_xtest=yes
		CFLAGS_XTEST=`"$PKG_CONFIG" --cflags xtst`
		LIB_XTEST=`"$PKG_CONFIG" --libs xtst`

cat >>confdefs.h <<\_ACEOF
#define HAVE_XTEST
_ACEOF

		{ echo "$as_me:$LINENO: result: yes" >&5
echo "${ECHO_T}yes" >&6; }
	else
		with_xtest=no
		{ echo "$as_me:$LINENO: result: no" >&5
echo "${ECHO_T}no" >&6; }
	fi
fi
-----------------------------------------------------------

to

--------------------------------------------------------
with_xtest=yes
CFLAGS_XTEST=""
LIB_XTEST=""
-------------------------------------------------------

Then:

./configure --prefix=/opt/kde LDFLAGS="-L/usr/X11R6/lib -lX11 -lXtst"
make
make install

Now, running kaffeine from a console and watching DVB-T, I can see the messages:

kaffeine: fake mouse movement

and the screensavers does not activate!

xtst.pc is present in libXtst at least since June 2005; imho if distros decide to drop it they have to fix the users too

Still happens (at random rather, it is not only like #6) -- Kaffeine 0.8.5 with xtst, and xtst.pc exists.

I can confirm that on Slackware 11 the file xtst.pc does not exist.

On Slackware 12 the file xtst.pc has been added in /usr/lib/pkgconfig.

not relevant for Kaffeine 1.* anymore (different methods of supressing screen savers are used)