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
Root cause of the periodic drops (found via the new logs): mpv was
exiting cleanly (err=nil, exit 0) with its status line at 100% — i.e.
end-of-stream. UniFi Protect closes some cameras' RTSP connections every
20-40s; with --keep-open=no --idle=no mpv treated that as the file
ending, exited, and the supervisor relaunched it ~3s later (the visible
drop).
- Add --loop-file=inf so mpv reopens the stream the instant it EOFs,
in the same process and window: sub-second recovery, no teardown,
no supervisor bounce. The supervisor now only fires for real crashes.
- Clean up the logged exit "reason": strip ANSI escapes and skip mpv's
transient A/V status prints, so a genuine error surfaces instead of
"\x1b[KV: 00:00:35 / 00:00:35 (100%)". Tests cover the parsing.
Also fold in the for_window IPC fix: sway's IPC parser splits comma-
joined command lists at the top level and does not fold the continuation
into for_window (unlike the config-file parser), so the map-time
placement rules errored with "Only views can have borders" and never
installed. Register each command separately; drop the redundant
border none (the kiosk config already sets default_border none).
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
