…you only have to do detection when required though (after the hotkey is pressed). Curious about the architecture of the 5fps solution.

I need to do it constantly, as I want to update the status if I mute/unmute manually. I want to make a physical mute button with a LED, so that's why I need that.

I believe Autohotkey's image detection has a parameter to select the relative range inside the application window to actually perform a search. If you constrain it to a smaller area (because you know that the UI only appears in that area) this can greatly improve the performance versus searching the entire window.

Edit: I should mention I have no idea if this works on the linux versus of autohotkey.