Three separate faults made cameras "not load" and the clock misbehave.
Clock rendered as nothing, or flashed ~200ms/second. The time was drawn as
an ASS osd-overlay pushed over mpv IPC, but on mpv 0.35 + Mesa/V3D + sway an
OSD overlay is rendered only on the frame where its content *changes*. Every
layer reports success while this happens (mpv returns error:success,
vo-configured is true, and sway reports the window visible at the right
rect), so it looks like a stacking or font bug and is neither. Ruled out:
pushing at 20Hz (identical content is ignored, so it still only redrew when
the second flipped), osd-msg1, show-text, and --pause (mpv stops redrawing
entirely). Fonts were never the issue.
The time is now baked into every frame by a drawtext filter re-reading a
small file the ticker rewrites once a second, with two constraints that cost
real time to find and are pinned by tests:
- The canvas alpha must be > 0. A fully transparent canvas (black@0.0 with
--alpha=yes) makes the glyphs inherit alpha 0 and the compositor draws
nothing -- this was the original invisible clock. New clock
background_opacity (default 0.45) is clamped in config *and* in args() so
no code path can produce an invisible clock.
- Readahead must be off. drawtext stamps the time when a frame is
*generated*, so buffering ahead makes the visible clock lag by the
readahead and swallows text-file updates entirely.
Since the text now arrives through a file, the clock needs no IPC socket:
dropped --input-ipc-server, the ipcPath field, and the stale-socket removal.
assEscape goes with the ASS path.
`views import` produced layouts with holes. viewmap derived the grid from
the slot count alone and ignored Protect's `layout` field, so Protect's
asymmetric 8-camera preset (four 2x2 tiles plus a right column of four 1x1)
landed as 8 tiles in a 3x3 grid -- the bottom-right cell was simply empty
and rendered as a blank rectangle. That preset is now mapped exactly; other
counts keep the uniform GridForSlots fallback rather than guessing at
presets I have not observed. Import also warns when a mapping would leave
empty cells or references a camera missing from the config, so a silent hole
cannot reach the screen again.
Also:
- clock.corner gains bottom-center and top-center (centered horizontally,
Margin still applies vertically).
- placeClock no longer re-issues `resize set` every tick. Re-asserting
geometry on a correctly-sized window makes sway send a configure event,
which makes mpv reallocate buffers and blank for a frame. New
compositor.Raise re-asserts z-order only, which is all the 2s tick needs;
geometry is re-placed only when it has actually drifted.
- README documents why the clock is drawn this way, the preset table and how
to add another from `views dump`, and three troubleshooting entries for
failure modes that all look like bugs: a blank tile whose mpv is running
(a stale camera entry -- re-adopting a camera in Protect assigns a new id
and often a slightly different name, and `discover` never prunes), cameras
in `cameras:` not being on screen (only the active layout's tiles stream),
and black bars inside tiles (non-16:9 grid cells; --panscan=1.0 crops to
fill instead).
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01LYhTnkp7VzJ67THeicgfAQ
A small always-on-top mpv window renders the local time in a screen
corner. Implementation notes:
- Transparent lavfi canvas (color=...@0.0, --alpha=yes) so the camera
video shows through; no new dependencies. If the compositor can't do
alpha it degrades to a dark backing, still legible.
- Time drawn as an ASS osd-overlay pushed over mpv IPC once a second:
white fill + black outline (\bord), so it reads on both bright (day)
and dark (night) scenes without sampling the picture. Formatting the
text in Go avoids any filtergraph escaping.
- Time computed with time.LoadLocation against a configured IANA zone
(default "Local"), so it's correct regardless of the host clock's zone
and handles DST. A bad zone name fails at startup.
- Managed on the daemon's own context (survives layout switches); the
daemon keeps it positioned and raised above camera tiles. ensureClock
is a no-op when the clock config + resolution are unchanged, so a
reload never disturbs it.
Config: new `clock` section (enabled, timezone, format, corner,
font_size, width, height, margin) with defaults and corner validation.
Documented in README and config.example (shipped enabled, America/Denver,
24-hour w/ seconds). Tests cover corner geometry.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
