mpv_inhibit_gnome

This mpv plugin prevents screen blanking in GNOME while playing media.

This is needed because neither mpv supports GNOME's inhibition protocol, nor GNOME supports the standard inhibition protocol (yet).

Installing

You can find the latest release here. Download mpv_inhibit_gnome.so and put it in your mpv scripts directory (by default it's ~/.config/mpv/scripts).

Manually building and installing

To build, the libdbus-1 library is needed (Arch: dbus, Fedora: dbus-devel, Ubuntu: libdbus-1-dev), as well as the header files for mpv (Arch: mpv, Fedora: mpv-libs-devel, Ubuntu: libmpv-dev).

To build run:

make

This will generate the plugin in lib/mpv_inhibit_gnome.so.

To install in the default per-user location ~/.config/mpv/scripts either copy it there or run:

make install

To install in the default system-wide location /usr/share/mpv/scripts run:

sudo make sys-install

Meson

Configure meson build and install to ~/.config/mpv/scripts:

meson --prefix=${XDG_CONFIG_HOME:-${HOME}/.config} build
ninja -C build install

Or just run:

./install.sh

Flatpak support

TL;DR:

make flatpak-install flatpakoverride

and you're good to go.

This will install the plugin in ~/.var/app/io.mpv.Mpv/config/mpv/scripts, and will punch a hole in the Flatpak sandbox to allow mpv to talk to the D-Bus address that GNOME uses for inhibiting screen blanking.

You can manually allow mpv to talk to the D-Bus address by running:

flatpak override --user --talk-name=org.gnome.SessionManager io.mpv.Mpv

It's also possible to use Flatseal to do that.