DVD Screensaver

What it does

A mark drifts across the screen at an angle, bounces off every edge it meets, and changes color as it does. Press Start, or Go Fullscreen to fill the screen with it. Nothing moves until you do one of those — the page opens on a still picture.

The line under the controls counts the bounces, and the one that matters: corner hits.

Why this is not the DVD logo

The screensaver everyone remembers bounced the DVD logo, and that logo is a trademark belonging to someone else. This page does not use it, copy it or imitate it. The mark here is our own — a plain rounded shape with the word "Screen" in this site's type, drawn in your browser. The name of the page is the name people search for; nothing more is implied by it.

The corner hit

A corner hit is counted when the mark meets a side and the top or bottom in the same instant. The mark always travels at 45 degrees, so how long that takes depends entirely on the size of your screen. We worked it out for this page in full screen: on a phone-sized screen the first corner hit comes after about a minute, and on common desktop screens anywhere from about nine to about forty-six minutes. The wait is the whole joke, and the page will not shorten it by nudging the mark toward a corner.

Keeping the screen awake

A screensaver nobody can see is not much use, so Keep screen awake starts switched on here. It only asks your browser while the scene is running, it lets go the moment you press Stop, hide the tab or leave, and the status line says whether your browser actually agreed. A screen left on uses power, so switch it off if you are leaving the room for long.

Does a screensaver protect your screen?

Not in the way the name suggests. Modern screens do not need one, and your operating system's own setting to turn the display off saves far more power than anything moving on it. What a moving picture does do is avoid leaving one still image on an OLED screen for hours. For a screen you simply want dark, the Black Screen is the honest choice; for something useful on a spare monitor, there is the Fullscreen Clock.