Saturday, July 21, 2007

HTPC: suspend after recording and DVD playback

I've been trying to get the Scaleo to shut down to S3 (suspend to RAM, power efficient and quiet) by tweaking the settings in the screensaver for Vista, but had some problems. After reading about Vista Power Management I reverted everything to default settings and chose the most energy efficient power scheme. During testing I set the shut down time to 1 minute. First I suspected that an active utorrent session might mess things up so I closed all open programs and verified that the computer shut down properly. It did. Then I started utorrent and repeated the test. It worked again.

Now for the ultimate test: schedule a recording, shut down the computer - which as you know after reading up on Allchins article means suspend. It works as expected. The computer wakes up for the recording, records the show and then shuts down. I had all kinds of problems before but it seems to work as it should so I'll stop tinkering.

I have one more test and that is to shut down the computer when media center is active. It seems (at least for MCE 2005) that the computer will not suspend after a scheduled recording if media center is active.

Also, I tried watching a DVD today. For a region 2 DVD it works, but it is unbearable - the fan and/or drive noise is terrible and is not an option. I haven't even tried a region 1 disc - it doesn't matter if it works with that noise level. I guess the stand-alone DVD player stays besides the TV for a while. For the long run, ripping DVDs and compressing them will be the way to go. I just need to find a good toolchain for that. Handbrake was promising, but does not support 5.1 sound or proper subtitles so no go.

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