TV Static Screensaver_

TV static screensaver, explained

What is the TV static screensaver?

It is a browser-based version of what an analogue (US: analog) television shows when nothing is tuned in: flickering black-and-white snow, horizontal tears and a slow bar rolling up the screen, seen through simulated CRT glass. Around that classic look it has seven more: colour snow, a NO SIGNAL screen with colour bars, a VHS tape, a wooden retro TV, a calm dead-channel blue, a cable fault and glitch art. Every frame is generated live with code, nothing is played back from a video, so the noise never loops. It runs in any current browser with nothing to download.

What TV static actually is

An analogue set with no station to lock onto simply amplifies whatever its aerial delivers and draws it on the screen as random specks. That input is a mix of thermal noise in and around the receiver, other radio transmissions and radio sources in space. Popular science write-ups say the cosmic microwave background, the leftover glow of the Big Bang, makes up roughly 1% of it or less.

How the noise is drawn

Each frame gets a fresh random value for every grain, and the Grain size slider decides how big a grain is. The picture is drawn on a few hundred lines (about 150 to 480, depending on the height of your screen) and stretched to fill the display. For comparison, an NTSC picture has 525 lines per frame, of which about 480 are usually counted as picture, and a PAL picture has 625; both are interlaced, with 59.94 fields per second for NTSC and 50 for PAL. This page is inspired by that look and does not copy either standard exactly. On top of the noise come the sync tears, the rolling hum bar, an occasional vertical roll and slowly breathing contrast.

The CRT glass

In a colour CRT, three electron beams pass through a shadow mask, a thin metal sheet with tiny holes just behind the glass, so each beam lands only on its own red, green or blue phosphor dots. The page imitates that with Scanlines and a fine dot mask, a rounded screen (Curvature), darker corners (Vignette), a soft glow and Fringing, where the colours separate a little more towards the edges. A phosphor tint turns the picture grey, green, amber or blue. Switch on the TV set (key B) to put the screen in a wooden cabinet with an antenna, knobs and a speaker grille, lit by the glow of the picture.

Eight looks and four test patterns

Classic static is black-and-white snow. Colour snow adds smeared red, green and blue chroma noise. No signal shows colour bars (a generic pattern drawn for this page) under a blinking NO SIGNAL box, with short bursts of noise. VHS is a sunset home video with tracking glitches, dropouts, a PLAY label and a live date stamp. Retro CRT TV puts the picture in the wooden set and lets it change channel by itself. Dead channel blue is a quiet blue screen with sparse snow. Cable fault shows simple shapes that wobble, lose sync, roll and sink into noise before locking again, about 18 seconds per cycle. Glitch art hits a neon scene with datamosh-style smears and RGB-split blocks. Press 1 to 8, or C and the arrow keys to surf on through channels 9 to 12: a test card, a grey ramp, a crosshatch and a stand-by card. A burst of snow plays between channels.

VHS: tracking and head switching

On real VHS playback a band of noise often shows at the very bottom of the picture. It comes from the moment the playback video heads switch over, just before the vertical sync. The VHS look recreates that band and adds tracking bands that wobble and tear the picture sideways, a washed, slightly smeared colour and a date stamp in the corner. It uses no brand names or logos.

Sound and the sleep timer

Sound is off until you switch it on with the button or the W key, and it is generated by your browser, not downloaded. White noise has equal power at every frequency, so it hisses. Pink noise has equal energy in every octave, which means its power falls by about 3 dB per octave, and brown noise falls faster, so it is the deepest rumble. Auto picks a colour that suits the channel; you can force white, pink or brown. The level follows the picture, so noise bursts get louder. Choose a sleep timer of 15, 30, 60 or 120 minutes (key S) and the sound and picture fade out over the last seconds before the picture collapses to a bright line and the screen switches off. Any key or touch wakes it. Some people like steady noise for falling asleep, but a systematic review of the research rated the evidence that continuous noise improves sleep as very low quality and noted that it may also have negative effects on sleep and hearing, so keep the volume low and treat it as a matter of taste.

On-screen display and clock

The corner display copies an old TV: a channel number, the look’s name and a volume bar in a pixel font, shown briefly on changes or always, or hidden. T adds an old digital TV clock in the corner. Both are drawn after the noise, so they stay readable.

Run it as a screensaver on a TV or monitor

Click the screen or press F for full screen, then leave the mouse alone: the cursor and the buttons hide after a few seconds. In full screen the page asks the browser to keep the display awake where the Screen Wake Lock feature is supported, which today means current versions of Chrome, Edge, Firefox and Safari. A web page cannot register itself as your operating system’s screensaver, so keep the browser in full screen and, where wake lock is missing, set the sleep timer of your system to Never. Add ?fs=1 to the address to fill the window as soon as the page opens; the first click then switches to true full screen. Where a browser has no full-screen mode for pages, as on some phones, the page fills the whole window instead.

Flicker and comfort

Flickering, high-contrast noise and rolling bars are the kind of fast change that can trigger seizures in people with photosensitive epilepsy, which affects roughly one in 4,000 people. If that applies to you, or you are not sure, it is best to skip this page. If your system asks for reduced motion, the page starts in the calm Dead channel blue look with flicker, rolling and channel changes off and the noise slowed down; you can do the same by hand with the Flicker, Rolling bar and Speed sliders, although snow always moves.

Smooth on slow devices

The whole analogue chain runs on your graphics chip as a WebGL shader at a sensible resolution. If WebGL is not available, or you switch GPU rendering off, a simpler Canvas 2D renderer takes over; it has no screen curvature and no chroma fringing. With Auto quality on, the page lowers the render resolution, and then the number of lines, when it stays below about 38 frames per second for three seconds. A hidden tab pauses by itself. Add ?aq=0 to switch auto quality off or ?gl=0 to force the Canvas 2D renderer.

Save a picture or share your setup

Save as PNG (key P) downloads the current frame, handy as a wallpaper or a video background. Copy link gives you an address that reopens the page with the same channel, sliders, tint and options. Your settings are also kept in your browser, and R resets them to Classic static.

Privacy

The noise is computed and drawn entirely in your browser and your settings stay in its local storage. The sound is generated there too and never uploaded. Nothing about what you do on the page is sent anywhere; like every page here it loads a web font and a cookie-free visit counter.

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