Keep a Video, Demo or Dashboard Playing While Your Mac Is Locked

Lock your Mac and the video stops mattering: audio may keep playing, but the screen goes black. That's a dead end for a surprising number of real situations — a demo loop at a booth, a dashboard on a shared screen, a movie for the kids on a flight, a livestream you're monitoring while you cook. You want the picture on screen and the machine protected from stray fingers.

What people try first

• Hot corners + "never sleep": keeps the display awake, but the Mac is completely unlocked. One tap on the spacebar pauses your video; one curious visitor gets your desktop.
• Guest account: better, but switching accounts kills your session, your logins and whatever else you had running. And the video is still pausable by anyone.
• Kiosk-style browsers: real kiosk software works for permanent installations, but it's heavy setup for "I need this protected for an hour".

The watch-only approach

The clean solution is the same one that works for unattended AI agent sessions: keep the screen alive, kill the inputs. With VibeLock:

1. Add your player — QuickTime, IINA, VLC, or a browser for YouTube/dashboards — to the Visible While Locked list from the menu bar.
2. Start the video or open the dashboard.
3. Click Lock. Every other app hides, the desktop is covered, the display stays awake, and the keyboard, trackpad and mouse go dead. The video keeps playing — spacebar included, because the spacebar no longer reaches the player.
4. Unlock any time with Touch ID or your Mac password.

Nobody can pause it, nobody can close it, nobody can ⌘Tab into your email — and prodding the keyboard just raises an authentication prompt.

Small print worth knowing

• VibeLock holds the display awake while locked, so you don't need to touch your energy settings.
• Fullscreen video works — VibeLock's shield logic covers other Spaces, and your allowed app's fullscreen Space is left alone.
• For sound-sensitive settings, set the volume before locking: volume keys are inputs too, and inputs are dead by design.

It's a small trick, but it turns any Mac into a temporary display you don't have to babysit — the same one-click lock that guards a keyboard-off, screen-on workflow everywhere else.