Comment 7 for bug 136604

TJ:
It's hard to say whether it would be worth building a library for apps to do suspend inhibiting because much of it is app dependent and most of it is a case of just using dbus which is a library anyway. Take a look at http://live.gnome.org/GnomePowerManager/FAQ (although be careful with the python examples - they are old and don't work on Gutsy, see http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=472812 ).

Supposedly rhythmbox has a plugin to some of this for local playing files already - http://svn.gnome.org/viewcvs/rhythmbox/trunk/plugins/power-manager/ . I don't think that this is working on Gutsy though (perhaps the dbus path needs updating?).