xscreensaver, mpv, and drone videos

Sup all.

So for a while i’ve had a folder with drone videos that i wanted to use as screensavers. So after a little digging in some xscreensaver and mpv settings i came up with this :

mpv \
    --shuffle \
    --really-quiet \
    --no-audio \
    --fs \
    --no-stop-screensaver \
    --wid=$XSCREENSAVER_WINDOW \
    $HOME/ss_videos/*

as you can see the path to my videos is $HOME/ss_videos/* and the options in mpv are pretty self explanatory.

Now we have to add that snippet into the .xscreensaver rc file.
Here is the shot of the snippet below:

Click image to enlarge

As you can see in that image the formatting is :

  Best:         "Drone Videos"  mpv --shuffle --really-quiet --no-audio       \
                                  --fs --no-stop-screensaver                  \
                                  --wid=$XSCREENSAVER_WINDOW                  \
                                  $HOME/ss_videos/*                                 \n\

The “Best” denotes the video driver to use.
The “Drone Videos” tag is what will show up in xscreensaver-demo when enabling.
This snippet is added in the “programs:” block in the .xscreensaver file.

Now restart your xscreensaver daemon (might be easier to restart X) and open up xscreensaver-demo.

Now scroll down to “Drone Videos” or whatever you labeled it.
Here is what mine looks like:

Click image to enlarge

Now just select and hit preview.

Happy hacking.