I have 2 video cards, both Nvidia FX-5200s. One has svideo and VGA out (was in my backend). The other has composite and DVI out (was in my diskless frontend).

I had been using the svideo and composite outputs on each of the cards until recently when I got an LCD TV that takes VGA input for my diskless frontend. To get VGA from my diskless frontend, I has to swap the video cards.

Now, with the new card in my backend, after 10 minutes of idle time in the mythtv menus, the composite output blanks the screen. This may have been the case for my diskless FE, but I never would have noticed it because I only turned it on when I was using it (no significant idle time in the menus).

Pressing any key on the keyboard (even ctrl or shift) brings the screen back to life, but pressing buttons on my remote does not. If hit the watch tv button with the remote, the screen comes back to life when the recording starts playing, but without being able to see the menus, there is no way to know if you are on the Watch TV button.

Is there a way to make remote control key presses bring the video card out of screen save mode?

Just in case it is relevant, I have a DVICO USB remote control.

I found a couple of suggestions on the mythtv-users mailing list:

1. Use irxevent to map one of your remote keys as follows:For the record, this does not work. My remote is already mapped that way.

2. Use these commands to disable screen blanking:However when I looked in ~mythtv/.fluxbox/apps, the line is already in there which I believe will do the same thing.

3. Disable video blanking in your computer's BIOS. (I didn't investigate this because I didn't think this was my issue.)

4. Comment out the line from the "Monitor" section of your xorg.conf file and restart X (pkill xinit). I did this and it has been sitting in the menus now for 20 minutes without blanking so hopefully that has done the trick.

5. Map a remote button that takes you to the Live TV Jumppoint, and use that button to bring it out of screen saver mode. This would probably work if you wanted to leave the screen saving feature active, but in my case, the WAF for this solution may be a problem.