Automation

TisVlay can react to what your computer is doing: blank the TV when you lock your screen, light it when you come back, power it off when the machine sleeps. You decide what happens by editing profiles, which map events (lock, unlock, idle, sleep, …) to actions (screen off, screen on, power off, power on, or nothing).

This page covers what happens out of the box, how to change it, and the rules that decide which TVs react. For the TV acting on your PC, see TV Controls PC.

What happens by default

Out of the box, a managed TV follows your desktop:

The TV blanking or waking along with your monitor (DPMS) is on too. Inactivity timers (blank the TV after N minutes idle) are off until you set them.

Wake events never fire for a TV while a stream has it armed, so streaming in from elsewhere doesn’t light an empty room.

Changing what happens

Open the Profiles page. There are two lists on the left:

• System profiles control what the machine does: boot, shutdown, reboot, sleep, wake, and your display blanking (DPMS). They also cover the login screen.
• User profiles control what you do in your desktop session: lock, unlock, idle, and streams. Each user account has its own.

Every list starts with a default profile (marked ✓), which every TV uses until you assign something else. It can’t be renamed or deleted.

To change a behavior, select a profile and change the dropdown beside the event, for example On session lock from screen_off to none. Changes apply immediately.

The actions are:

Next to each dropdown are two small icon toggles:

• Land on primary input (the remote icon): after this action, switch the TV to your PC’s input. This needs the TV’s Primary input set on its page, and a TV that can switch inputs (not HDMI-CEC).
• Suppressed / fires while streaming (the network icon): whether this event still happens while a stream has the TV armed. See Streaming.

The idle events have two timers, Idle timeout (locked) and Idle timeout (unlocked), each in seconds, where 0 turns the timer off. The first applies at the lock screen, the second while you’re logged in and active. The On idle timeout and On idle resume actions say what happens when either timer fires and when activity returns.

Creating, duplicating, and assigning profiles

• Click + beside System profiles or User profiles to create a profile. Duplicate one with the copy icon, and rename or delete it with the icons in its header. The header’s Used by list links to the TVs that use it.
• A profile only needs to hold what’s different. A field you haven’t changed is inheriting (it follows the default profile); a field you’ve changed is set, and has an accent bar on its left edge and a reset icon. Click reset to hand the field back to the default, or use the reset icon beside User profile or System profile to do it for every field.
• To use a profile, open the TV on the TVs page and pick it under PROFILES (System and User). The pencil beside each dropdown jumps to that profile in the editor. The tray menu also has a Profiles submenu for each TV.

Two ideas that cover most setups

• A TV that ignores your desktop (a gaming TV, say): create a user profile with every event set to none, and assign it to that TV. Or leave the profile alone and set the system profile’s Automate when setting so it only automates while the TV is showing your PC (see below).
• Different behavior for different people: user profiles belong to each account, so your account can blank aggressively while a shared account does nothing, on the same TV.

The events

Your desktop session (user profiles)

• Lock wake is there so the TV is lit before you type your password; the later unlock then has nothing left to do. (Wayland sessions only.)
• Idle is independent of your desktop’s own screen-locking and blanking timers.
• Multiple users: only the foreground session on a seat acts. With fast user switching, a backgrounded user’s lock and idle events are ignored until they’re active again, so one account can’t blank or wake the TV under whoever is using the machine.

The machine (system profiles)

On startup, on shutdown, on reboot, on sleep, and on wake are handled by the system service, with no one logged in. On DPMS off and On DPMS on mirror your host display’s power state onto the TV that shares its connector, so the TV follows your monitor blanking even before you log in. When a session is running, the lock and idle events can fire for the same blank; that overlap is harmless.

Login-screen idle

An unattended login screen never blanks by itself. The optional TisVlay greeter client closes that gap, using the system profile’s Idle timeout with On idle timeout and On idle resume. Blanking stays off until you set a non-zero timeout. GDM and plasma-login-manager are supported; the distro packages enable it for both, and on NixOS it turns on by itself for either. See Installation. It also lights the panel once at startup, so the login screen isn’t left dark after a logout.

Which TVs react

For an event to do anything to a TV, three things must agree:

1. The TV’s Managed switch (on its page, under STATUS) is on. An unmanaged TV is never automated, and it doesn’t act on your PC either (TV Controls PC).
2. The system profile’s Automate when setting allows it: always, on_primary (only while the TV is showing your PC’s input), or off_primary (only while it’s showing something else).
3. No stream is suppressing the event (see below).

Manual actions from the app, the tray, or the command line always run, regardless.

Streams

A separate gate applies on top: while a stream has a TV armed, wake actions are suppressed unless the event’s stream toggle is set to fire. It’s independent of Automate when. The rules are in Streaming.

How profiles resolve

Resolution is per field, not per profile. For each field, TisVlay looks along a chain and uses the first value that’s set:

the TV's assigned profile  →  the default profile  →  built-in defaults

So a profile only spells out what it changes, and it keeps tracking the default for everything else. If you later edit the default, every field that isn’t set follows along.

User profiles resolve along the same chain, with your user profiles in place of the system ones.

To see exactly what a TV will do, use the command line’s tisvlay system-profile <tv> --effective (and user-profile for your user profile); the app shows set versus inheriting per field.

Making sure it’s running

Lock and idle events need the per-user session service. The sidebar’s Session indicator should be green. If an event fires but the TV does nothing, see Automation does nothing. Actions are verified and retried, and a boot-time or resume-time wake waits for the network; see Networking & Reliability.

tisvlay profile system list                  # system profiles, with ids
tisvlay profile system create "guest" --body '{"on_startup":"none","on_wake":"none"}'
tisvlay system-profile <tv-id> <profile-id>  # assign; --clear unassigns, no id prints it
tisvlay profile user list                    # user profiles
tisvlay user-profile <tv-id> <profile-id>
tisvlay system-profile <tv-id> --effective   # one TV's fully resolved mapping
tisvlay managed <tv-id> off                  # stop automating a TV