Tasker: unable to use fullscreen overlay in immersive mode?

[Robert Yung]

I'm trying to have tasker blank the entire screen, including the top status bar and bottom nav bar. But overlays don't seem to cover the top and bottom bars. If I switch to immersive mode to hide the bars, there seems to be a bug in tasker that crops the scene at the top and bottom. I don't want to use an activity instead because that causes the underlying app to lose focus.

In non-immersive mode, of my 1440x2560 screen, tasker seems to only want to use 1440x2308:

With immersive mode, tasker seems to allow the full screen for scenes:

But when I show the scene, the top and bottom rows are cropped:

The top crop seems to match the size of the status bar. The bottom crop is surprisingly smaller than the size of the nav bar and looks to be the same size as the top crop.

This is how I'm showing the scene:

[Robert Yung]

Interesting: on 7.1.2, the scene property has geometry fields to set the size of the scene. But on 8.0.0, the geometry fields are missing.

If I set the show scene setting from 'overlay, blocking fullscreen' to just 'overlay', I then have the option to change the vertical position. If I set the position to 'top', now the scene is able to cover the top bar area but the bottom is shifted up to leave an area that looks to be the same size as the nav bar. Changing the vertical position to bottom doesn't make a difference.

So it seems like tasker just wants to leave room for the bottom nav bar. When the overlay is shown as fullscreen, the bottom bar is half overwritten, so it seems technically it's possible for tasker to cover the bottom bar.

[Robert Yung]

Gave up on using Scenes and looked at plugins.

Screen Filter plugin + Immersive Mode (via AutoTools) seemed promising, but a bug/feature of Screen Filter is that the lowest brightness setting is 1.8%. The screen appears all black, but examining a screenshot shows that the pixels are not 100% black but just very dark (use an image tool with magic wand set to zero tolerance). So on an AMOLED screen, the pixels would still be on and sucking power.

AutoTools' Gesture Screen offers a 100% black background and built-in immersive mode. But one issue is that when the Gesture Screen is active, it takes app focus from the previous app and that messes up my tasker profile that triggers based on the active app. I had a similar issue when I tested my scene as a fullscreen activity instead of an overlay.

Workaround is to add AutoTools as an additional app to trigger my profile. I couldn't use this workaround with a Scene Activity as tasker will not allow you to select itself as a profile app.

[Robert Yung]

I found one issue with the workaround. If I'm recording a video with the camera, invoking the gesture screen will make the camera stop recording. This does not happen with Screen overlays. :(

[Richard Kemp]

Firstly, is 1.8% brightness not good enough? I was under the impression that AMOLED pixels use power only in proportion to their brightness.

Second, you could try looking at the plugin "rootdim", if your device is rooted. It has the capability (device-dependent) on setting the brightness lower than is available through normal means, and I believe on some devices it can go so low as to disable the "backlight" altogether.

[Robert Yung]

On Friday, September 22, 2017 at 6:29:52 PM UTC-4, Richard Kemp wrote:

Firstly, is 1.8% brightness not good enough? I was under the impression that AMOLED pixels use power only in proportion to their brightness.

Second, you could try looking at the plugin "rootdim", if your device is rooted. It has the capability (device-dependent) on setting the brightness lower than is available through normal means, and I believe on some devices it can go so low as to disable the "backlight" altogether.

I prefer the pixels to be completely off. It's likely that with the overlay, the device will never go to sleep and the screen will always be on, so every bit of savings of battery life counts. And of course, there is burn-in to watch out for.

I'm also not rooted. 

[Robert Yung]

OK, I think I found the perfect plugin: Pixel Filter. I tried it a long time ago, but I see that it now has tasker support! And it cover the screen with 100% black pixels or any pattern you want, all without blocking input to the screen or taking focus from the underlying app. So with immersive mode + pixel filter, I got what I wanted.

[JD]

I'm happy you found a workaround but I wish Pent would fix the original issue. It's very annoying.