[Cthulhu_]

Screensavers are a thing again on modern TV because OLEDs have a pretty serious burn-in problem apparently. Not much creativity there, probably because it should not be annoying, so it's stuff like art galleries or subtle fireworks effects that also 'train' the pixels.

Best screensaver I used to have was the BSOD one from xscreensaver, so many people fell for it.

Second best is the nyan cat screensaver.

Currently have an Apple image gallery of space themed pictures.

[elondaits]

The Apple TV 4k screensavers (city flyovers filmed in slow motion with a drone) are beautiful and I always end up staring at the screen for a while.

https://youtu.be/lbj9kihTwcc

[cwizou]

That's a horribly outdated version linked in that video sadly, and that one no longer runs on recent macOS (because it's not notarized).

Just in case anyone wants to try it, please grab latest build here instead : https://github.com/JohnCoates/Aerial/releases

Or if you want an installer with auto updates, get it here : https://aerialscreensaver.github.io

Latest betas include Apple Music/Spotify integration, Speed control, and brings back the ability to put your videos anywhere (including an external drive!) on Monterey.

[jdmichal]

Wow! Is there anything similar that you know of for Android TV? I would love to have something like this over the stock photo slideshow.

[cwizou]

I only make the mac version, but I've seen this "port" for Android TV.

No guarantees from me that it's any good : https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.codingbuff...

It's open source too, according to the description, it streams and doesn't cache videos and apparently it handles 4K HDR. If data usage is a concern to you, be aware that some videos are close to 1 GB.

[danudey]

I use this one on my TV, and it's great, highly recommend.

If bandwidth is a concern, you can also point it towards a local JSON file with whatever URLs you want, so you can mirror the screensavers locally and then stream them from there.

[danudey]

I grabbed a screensaver app for my Sony TV that uses the AppleTV 4K HDR screensavers, and... yeah, it's really, really nice.

Not all of them are city flyovers; there are also long, slow pans of areas like the Great Wall. Generally, it's just gorgeous.

[mmcconnell1618]

Part of the reason these are so captivating is that they are slowed down instead of real time. This gives them an other-worldly quality where you can see extreme detail but in a different motion than you would normally see it.

[giantrobot]

Many of the cityscape ones I don't believe are slowed down, at least the ones I have seen. If you watch the movement of traffic it appears to be moving at normal speeds. Even the orbital ones appear to be real-time.

The otherworldliness of the video seems to come more from the smoothness of the motion and the uncommon perspective. Because many of the scenes are captured with drones instead of helicopters or airplanes they have a literal bird's perspective in terms of velocity and altitude.

[cwizou]

It's been an ongoing debate I've had with some Aerial users, but I agree with you. Most if not all are real time or barely slowed down (latest beta I've put a slider to speed a video up/down partly to try and settle this).

They definitely are massively stabilised though and Apple used to update videos from time to time, tweaking stabilization, colors or sometimes length and pushing new versions. They haven't done that in a long while though.

Some seem shot from fairly high altitude and may use planes instead, and at least for some videos, I've heard they used 3rd parties to shoot them.

[sneak]

The other reason is that you have to have biggest-company-in-the-world-sized connections (and pocketbook) to get permission to run a 120fps 8k drone over an active LAX.

Such a subtle huge flex.

[ericbarrett]

Airports have PR departments. LAX's is: https://www.lawa.org/groups-and-divisions/public-relations

I'm sure for the right opportunity they'd work with anybody. I suspect it's not a matter of connections, but rather, "We'll put a gorgeous shot of your facility on millions of TVs worldwide" is a slam-dunk pitch.

[donatj]

In high school in the very early 2000s my friends and I thought it was hilarious to add bluescreen slides to our PowerPoint presentations. Most of the computers ran Windows 98 and it was a common sight, we’d get gasps in class.

It was dumb harmless fun.

[dylan604]

I knew someone that failed to prepare for their presentation, and did this as an excuse the presentation computer was not working and had to reschedule

[nsxwolf]

My favorite trick was to take a screenshot of the desktop, hide all the icons and the task bar, then set the screenshot as the wallpaper. It gets even the most advanced users every time.

[geoduck14]

I did this to a girl at school. It ended up moving all of her singer, and iTunes found them "again", so half of her songs would show an error "can't find this file", because it was pointing to the old location.

It was the prank that kept on giving.

[sunshineforever]

This is the one I used to do

[willis936]

It's my last day at my current job. Thank you for inspiring me to set up a 1 minute BSOD screensaver for the next person who uses my current workstation.

[tablespoon]

> It's my last day at my current job. Thank you for inspiring me to set up a 1 minute BSOD screensaver for the next person who uses my current workstation.

What company won't wipe and reimage it before redeployment?

Hell, I usually wipe my own work PCs before surrendering them after an upgrade, to make sure it's done properly.

[willis936]

It's a relatively small lab in a university and part of my job is keeping the computers running.

I could wipe, but I want to make as little work for my replacement as possible. Well, maybe a few minutes of extra work to get rid of a screensaver.

[moftz]

If it's a desktop workstation with lots of expensive development tools installed or a delicate toolchain (especially one in a lab), why spend the time and effort wiping the thing just to reinstall all of the same stuff over again? It might even be a shared computer. I remember my help desk summer job, I worked at a hot desk that was staffed 24/7 so the same computers were used by first, second, and third shift. There were a lot of things that had to be logged into (mainframes, customer email accounts, etc) and not all of the desktops covered the same customers so it would have been a nightmare to handle all of the images and configurations. Whenever a configuration had to change, they would make a new backup to cover that specific desktop in case it died.

[sumtechguy]

I was always fond of this one.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/blue...

[willis936]

The electron guns in CRTs also take about 30 minutes to warm up. Before then the black level is pretty high and the image is washed out. So there is benefit to running a screensaver on a CRT but OLEDs do best when just put to sleep quickly.

[vidanay]

Uhhh, no. I've never seen a CRT take more than 10-15 seconds to "warm up", and I've been looking at CRTs since the early 70's.

[willis936]

When was the last time you looked at one? Was it todsy? I own half a dozen PVMs and two PC monitors and have been looking at CRTs consistently since the 90s.

[citrin_ru]

It takes about 5 second for my LCD monitor to wake-up after a sleep, which is a bit annoying. A screen saver disappears in a fraction of a second even on old hardware.

[fubar2018aug]

Working on a next-gen operating system for a large tech company in the Pacific NorthWest in the previous century, I was able to reliably bluescreen the OS when stressing the network using an internal network protocol driver.

Later that day, I read in one of the trade rags about a columnist talking about the efficacy of a bluescreen screensaver.

1+1 = 2

Less than an hour later, most of it spent transcribing the bluescreen text output, I had a BSOD screensaver. Released it to the company intranet and waited for the ensuing hilarity.

Wasn't long before the guys in the build lab took advantage of the screensaver.

They installed the BSOD screensaver and disconnected the mouse and keyboard.

The main dev on the project comes in, sees the bluescreen and proceeds to restart the computer! Oops.

A few years later, on another multi-year large software project at this PNW tech company, the morning that the software was supposed to be signed off and released to manufacturing, the build lab, different group of people, installed the BSOD screensaver and disconnected the mouse and keyboard on the dogfood server for the project.

When the project manager arrived, he went to check on the status of the server, only to find the BSOD. This time a server restart was averted.

So, it's all fun and games until a server is hard rebooted.

[rideontime]

> Best screensaver I used to have was the BSOD one from xscreensaver, so many people fell for it.

Same here - including myself, when I came back from a bathroom break to find it had landed on the MacOS error screen.

[kergonath]

I used to change my screensaver every week or so. These days, I’m really happy with a slightly customised Flurry on macOS, or an clone on Linux.

[spywaregorilla]

The new nintendo switch has an oled screen. Is that likely to be vulnerable to burn in due to game ui staying constant?

[jfrunyon]

https://www.cnet.com/tech/computing/worried-about-nintendo-s...

> We've designed the OLED screen to aim for longevity as much as possible, but OLED displays can experience image retention if subjected to static visuals over a long period of time. However, users can take preventative measures to preserve the screen [by] utilizing features included in the Nintendo Switch systems by default, such as auto-brightness function to prevent the screen from getting too bright, and the auto-sleep function to go into 'auto sleep' mode after short periods of time.