How to log entire media screentime?

When I use video apps like VLC, although the watcher picks up the entire usage duration only the short not-afk period gets logged into the dashboard. For example, although I watched movies for more than an hour, ‘Top applications’ and ‘Top window titles’ only put into account the 5-minute not-afk duration when I changed subtitles/etc. So I would like to know if there is a way to either show afk logs in the dashboard graphs or give an exception to VLC and other afk-centered apps and somehow log their entire usage time as not-afk.

I’m sorry that my first post here is a rant, but other than the media afk issue, I had a great time using ActivityWatch. In fact, I think this might be the most streamlined, easy to use app of it’s kind.

Similar things has been discussed before, we have a solution in progress to fix it for browsers playing media (such as being on YouTube or Netflix on Firefox or Chrome etc.).

Solving this issue for VLC would be a bit different though, but it would be possible to solve I think. We could for example trick activitywatch to always consider the user to be “not-afk” when the VLC app is in focus. There has been no work on such a feature however.

2 Likes