MediaMVP & Energy Saving Strategies

[drain]

I solved this problem by building a simple circuit that detects the video output from the MVP can triggers the "ring" signal on the serial port. If the BIOS is set to "wake on ring", the PC will wake up as soon as you turn on your MVP.

If you have any experience in building simple electronics, and want to give it a try, I can post the circuit.

[bendrl]

Drain,

That circuit sounds really interesting. Can you post it? Thanks!

[cheapohubby]

Are these older machines that you guys are using? Because, as far as I can tell, gbpvr/windows seems to do a perfectly fine job of waking the machine up from hibernation/standby to record shows. Leastways, my machine seemed to work fine when I had hibernation enabled a few months back.

I've currently got it disabled, because of the MVP. I got tired of coming home and having to boot my machine manually, before I could watch recorded shows. But I was wondering if I could get remote wakeup to work via the LAN. Not sure, but maybe this will give me the incentive to do some experimenting tonight. Even it if does boot the machine, there will be an annoying delay while the machine boots, before the MVP will be functional.

On the harddrive spinup issue; I gotta agree that it's not really worth powering them down. I looked up my 160gb WD drive, and it only draws 8watts while idle versus 1watt in standby. Even if the drive is on all the time, that's less than $10 electricity per year.

Monitors in standby are also pretty low power. I found a 19" KDS that was rated at 5watts. My ancient old Princeton is rated at 15watts. That being said; it's really not a big hastle to hit the power switch either.

I think my holy grail for power management would be to have the machine hibernate after a short idle period, wake as required by gbpvr or MVP, and stay awake during my peak viewing hours of 5pm to midnight. I'm hoping I can achieve that with the remote lan wakeup, and maybe some events on the windows scheduler.

[drain]

cheapohubby, aparently wake-on-lan is not possible with the current dongle.bin. Have a look at this thread http://forums.nextpvr.com/showthread.php?t=2385

bendrl, i'll draw up the circuit when I get a chance and post it soon.

[cheapohubby]

Thanks for the link to the thread... yeah, pretty much came to the same conclusion; after all my experimenting. The best I could come up with, was using the laptop that's in the family room to wakeup the main machine in the office. At least that saves me making the trip from one end of the house to the other.

We'll see if this setup works acceptably, or if I end up going back to leaving the machine up 24/7.

I'll have to have a peek at this shspvr.com site, for curiosity sake.

[borgs5]

I solved this problem by building a simple circuit that detects the video output from the MVP can triggers the "ring" signal on the serial port. If the BIOS is set to "wake on ring", the PC will wake up as soon as you turn on your MVP.

If you have any experience in building simple electronics, and want to give it a try, I can post the circuit.

Excellent idea, I'd be interested in that circuit also please. It's good that its a simple circuit as I'm rubbish with a soldering iron! I'd have to probably come up with some modified com plug in order to get the modem and mvp connected at the same time but it would be more than worth it for the convenience.

[ww4397]

I solved this problem by building a simple circuit that detects the video output from the MVP can triggers the "ring" signal on the serial port. If the BIOS is set to "wake on ring", the PC will wake up as soon as you turn on your MVP.

If you have any experience in building simple electronics, and want to give it a try, I can post the circuit.

Like the others above, I'm very interested in the circuit, too.

I haven't had any luck using Wake on Ring using an internal modem. I've set the bios (Biostar MN7CDPro) to WOR and checked that the modem driver is set to "Allow this device to wake PC from Standby" but still it doesn't work. Based on what I've read after Googleing, I *think* the WOR only works with external modems. I'm not 100% convinced yet but I'm starting to lean that way too. This circuit would allow me (us) to circumvent the modem completely. That would be a simple and elegant solution.

Looking forward to trying your circuit.

[drain]

PDF of circuit attached. I've probably missed out some important details, so don't be afraid to ask questions, or for more details about construction.

ww4397: My internal modem wakes my PC on ring just fine. I was trying to use it as an answer phone, but the software that came with the modem is utter crap. Can anyone suggest good answer phone software?

[ATTACHMENT NOT FOUND]

[ww4397]

PDF of circuit attached. ...

[ATTACHMENT NOT FOUND]

drain,

I can't get your file. I'm receiving the following error:

File does not begin with '%PDF-'.

Any ideas?

[sub]

The PDF seems to open here.