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vchlum / hue-lights

Gnome Shell extension for Philips Hue compatible lights controlled by the Philips Hue Bridge and for controlling Philips Hue HDMI sync box.
https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/3737/hue-lights/
MIT License
191 stars 14 forks source link

Entertainment area sync in Wayland leads to choppy performance (but no fps drops!) when gaming and very unpleasant flickering #89

Open EXCIDIVM opened 1 month ago

EXCIDIVM commented 1 month ago

First off: Thank you SO much for this extension. It is literally so good that it forces me to use GNOME over KDE, which I would otherwise strongly prefer.

That being said, I run this on Arch Linux, Nvidia 560.31.02 drivers, 4 screens.

On X11, both the gaming performance AND the way hue lights look is just perfect. In fact, it's like a clone of the official Windows Hue App which I always regarded as THE best light syncing app there is. Mostly because it is the ONLY syncing app I know that creates really smooth transitions between color changes. All other syncing options I tried (both for Windows and Linux) are flickering like mad, reacting too strongly to every change in color. But with your extension, it's super smooth!

On Wayland, however, the story is a different one. And maybe there is nothing you can do about it, because it's just about Wayland and GNOME. But anyway, in Wayland, everything still works. But two things happen:

  1. Games start to become really choppy. The FPS stay stable and don't change at all. Yet it feels like I am having huge frame skips, teleporting between steps etc. The second I turn this extension off, everything is smooth again with the same fps. It almost feels like on Wayland, turning sync on makes my G-Sync disappear (but it feels even worse).

  2. The lightning effect itself becomes VERY unpleasant. Kind of like every other hue sync option there is (including Corsair iCue, OpenRGB and some other Linux Hue Sync projects). It feels like the color of the bulbs now updates 100 times per second. The opposite of smooth.

Anyway, just wanted to report this. Not sure if anyone else has experienced this. I'm afraid this might just be the way Wayland handles color extraction.

vchlum commented 1 month ago

Hi @EXCIDIVM! I am glad you like this extension:-)

Yes, I know about issues with light sync. It has been reported. Unfortunately, I am not happy with the current sync light implementation:-(. It is far from perfect. I am partially limited by gjs possibilities and this extension uses the gjs function to get the color of the screen now. It causes the flickering:-(

I am ready to change the implementation of light syncing in favor of GStreamer but I am hitting the bug https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gjs/-/issues/557. I will change the implementation to use the GStreamer once the bug is resolved. I tried to help with the bug but no luck yet. Once the bug is resolved, I will replace the sync implementation and It will be available only on new versions of gjs. As an Arch user, you get it in the shortest time, but I have no idea when:-(.

Sorry, for not having better news now.