Lock Screen - Turn display off leads to freeze when a virtual screen is mirrored

[Trundicho]

OSX Ventura:

The lock screen menu option: Turn display off when inactive leads to a freezing image.
I'm locked out but the display does not turn off.

How can I prevent this?

[Trundicho]

My current settings:

[Trundicho]

Hm, after trying multiple times I have to sadly say that the proposed workaround does not work.

It looks like:

• Mac gets the sleep command
• The image freezes
• sleepwatcher shuts down BetterDisplay but still the image is frozen

[waydabber]

Yeah, thought so. I tried the method of super-quickly disconnecting the dummy the instant the sleep notification comes but that does not work either. Now an external script killing BetterDisplay is a magnitude slower. But thanks for trying anyway!

[Trundicho]

Thanks for the insights.

I now have a working solution with the idle and idleResume parameter: I just set the timer a bit before the sleep timer.
Example: Mac sleep timer is 10Minutes, sleepwatcher idle to 9Minutes, 55seconds

To set this up you have to edit:
/opt/homebrew/Cellar/sleepwatcher/2.2.1/homebrew.mxcl.sleepwatcher.plist

...<key>ProgramArguments</key> <array> <string>/opt/homebrew/opt/sleepwatcher/sbin/sleepwatcher</string> <string>-V</string> <string>-t</string> <string>5955</string> <string>-i</string> <string>/Users/yourusername/.sleep</string> <string>-R</string> <string>/Users/yourusername/.wakeup</string> </array>...

Then brew services start sleepwatcher

In this case you need to give sleepwatcher Input Monitoring permission: MacOs - Settings - Privacy & Security - Input Monitoring

[waydabber]

Nice trick. This obviously works with a timed sleep, not a manual one but if you mostly use this, it is a great solution! 👍

[Trundicho]

I used and tested it for a while now.

The idle part works perfect.

But the idleResume does not work in cases where:
The mac sleeps, someone touches the mouse and the betterDisplay gets started through sleepwatcher idleResume
But the screenLock-Login is shown and there is no user interaction.
Then the mac returns to sleep I don't know after about 1 or 2 minutes - much shorter then the configured 10minutes.
So in that case the display freezes again.

I didn't find a solution to start a sh script after successful login after screenLock.
So I disabled the -R option in the sleepwatcher config and just put a wakeup.sh in to the taskbar where I manually click after login.

So for me it's ok now because I have a half automated approach and I don't risk that my display shows a frozen screen for many hours.

[yuvalavidor]

Was this fixed in any version? I'm running the latest BetterDisplay and MacOS.
This leads to a situation that the screen is always on, you can even see the time the screen turned off from the PC itself (since the picture freezes on the time where the screen turns off)

[waydabber]

No, on some systems sleep will have issues when a virtual screen is mirrored (so try to avoid that except if absolutely necessary - use flexible scaling instead if possible). This is a macOS bug and was not fixed so far. Affects only Apple Silicon Macs.