Little orange dot in very upper-right corner of video window

Videosync
1

Hi! Has anyone seen this? And do you know how to get rid of it?

It looks kind of like the little dot that shows up to let you know an application might be using the system microphone.

It only shows up in the Videosync window … which of course also means that it’s showing up on our projections at our live shows :sweat_smile:

It’s not the absolute worst thing in the world — but it would be better if it weren’t there.

Grateful for any ideas! This is on a Macbook Air running MacOS Ventura 13.4.1.

Thanks! — jamie

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It IS the dot that shows microphone access to the computer.

The only way I know to be rid of it for Videosync is to deny Ableton access to the microphone in Mac System Preferences.

System Prefs > Security and Privacy > Microphone > unselect Ableton Live in the menu and reboot Live if necessary.

The only catch is, now Ableton won’t receive ANY audio input (microphone or any audio interface) until you restore this setting, which is a bugger if you have any live audio input to your Ableton session.

There are/were other ways around killing the orange dot that require doing some freaky stuff in Terminal, but this involves greatly compromising your Mac security settings - something that I’m not prepared to do.

This definitely is a major issue for anyone wanting to use a Mac for professional presentation video! See below:

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Ha. I had a suspicion. Thank you for confirming it! As it happens, I’m not doing audio input to Ableton in this particular configuration, so I could do this workaround, and may. Still janky as hell though :joy: But thank you! :blush:

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i’m told (not proven) that outputting via a Blackmagic device will remove the dot. Expensive solution.

Cheaper: When I use my own projector, I overscan by 2/3 pixels to get rid of it. Clunky, but it works for rough-and-ready live stuff.

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Yeah, I reckon that for $800 I would rather have the dot :joy: In all seriousness, though, overscanning is a good idea! I bet at least some of the venues we encounter will have people who know how to do that with their projector. EVERYONE ELSE GETS THE DOT :skull:

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We use Blackmagic gear, it doesn’t remove the orange dot. Audio preferences is the only solution as far as I know.

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argh. there’s no escape… thanks for sharing. You have saved me some money. What gear exactly are you referring to?

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The Blackmagic ATEM switcher

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New Videosync user here - hello!
Experienced the dot today but found this which seems a fiddle, but OK I think?
https://cdm.link/2023/10/fix-the-orange-dot/

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i think you have to disable some heavy OS security stuff for that to work. I wasn’t inclined to do that. But if you are - and it works - please let us know. It’s a real pain, and I’m not seeing any indication it’ll get fixed in the future.

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I installed that utility, Recording Indicator Utility, and it works - the dot goes. However, installing, turning it off and turning it back on, whilst simple enough, is cumbersome and requires a couple of restarts for each step. Here are some notes to help you decide if it is right for you.

When you run the software for the first time it guides you through the installation steps to turn off System Integrity Protection, which requires you to restart in recovery mode, go to Terminal and run a command to turn it off. When you restart, you go back to the Utility, click the toggle to turn off the indicator, enter your admin password, restart again, and then it is gone. I tested that on a couple of different monitors: no dot and that does feel better, I couldn’t stop looking at it.

I followed the process to restore the System Integrity Protection (SIP) to its default which goes like this: click the toggle in the utility to re-activate the dot, then it asks you to re-start. When you go back to the utility there is a new button to click to ‘raise security levels’ - click that, enter admin password, re-start again and you are back to normal. I should add that the last re-start took a while, probably no more than 5 seconds before the screen went ‘off’ then a little longer than usual to reboot. I guess it is doing something …

I guess there are 2 risks. One is that while SIP is disabled your machine suffers from an attack that SIP would have prevented. The second is that the Utility does not work as described when it restores the defaults and leaves you vulnerable when you think otherwise.

If I understand the Apple article correctly, SIP protects your machine by preventing software installers from modifying system files. Unless there was malicious code lying dormant from a previous installation, a machine with SIP de-activated wouldn’t lose the protection of SIP until software was being installed. When software is being installed without SIP the installer has root access to the whole file system; this was stopped by introducing SIP in OS X El Capitan, in 2015. So, it is a level of protection we have had for getting on for 10 years.

Despite restoring defaults using the utility, I’ve not been able to test that SIP is correctly running. I guess I will have to trust the developer on that.

If I understand correctly, with SIP off, any time you are required to give your admin password in an installation you are potentially at risk. So, if you are inclined to install software on a whim, perhaps its not a good idea. Perhaps if you had a machine or a partition solely for performance work, with no access to the internet for example then you could leave SIP off once you have installed what you need.

Here’s the link

On balance, I think the option to overscan on your projector is probably easier!

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thanks, that was some pretty comprehensive feedback! My brain balks at tasks like the one you just outlined, so I’m gonna overscan until I have a situation that requires another solution.

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Hey everyone,

It seems Apple has come up with a way to fix this for external monitors: Hide privacy indicators on external displays in macOS - Apple Support

I haven’t tried it yet, but it looks promising.

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thanks so much for posting this. Fingers crossed…