Anyway to shutdown TV after going into screensaver

[Elmo Putney]

My good lady has no comprehension of energy costs, I frequently come home to 2 TV's being on sitting at the main NPVR menu while shes in another room....I was musing this yesterday and wondered if there was a possible solution.

Would it be possible for NPVR to transmit an IR code to put the TV into standby, and then another if the keyboard is pressed or remote to wake up the TV?

What hardware would be required and what would need to be done to NPVR? I am not a coder and I know nothing about IR blasters and the like ...so this would need some help.

On a related subject back in gbpvr days I tried to get windows powersaving to shut down the display after xx mins of screensaver (bypassing the gbpvr screensaver) this didn't work the screen stayed on but blank...is this because it's a TV not a monitor so lacks support of this function or maybee an HDMI limitation.

[Reddwarf]

Anyway, there's very little to save by turning off the tv. If you really want to save energy you should start with the devices that really consumes energy in a home.

[johnsonx42]

are you so sure about that? I was once going to justify the purchase of an LCD tv by the presumed power savings over my current crt-projection tv, and found to my surprise that they consume over 200 watts.

[Reddwarf]

are you so sure about that? I was once going to justify the purchase of an LCD tv by the presumed power savings over my current crt-projection tv, and found to my surprise that they consume over 200 watts.

200W? Are you sure that's persistent power consumption? I'm looking a a 32" LCD-tv that says 150W but the loudspeaker effect is 100W, and with no sound I can't imagine that it draws that much power.

[Elmo Putney]

It's rather irrespective what the power consumption is, I have an old'ish 32 LCD I'm guessing the backlight uses 60W+, I wouldn't leave a light on in a room when I'm at the other end of the house. I have made great efforts moving my lighting over to LED (5W vs. 30W per bulb) just to see it thrown away, nevermind the limited lifetime of an lcd backlight.

The point is it could be off....and should be.....can I automate it?

[johnsonx42]

I don't think anything is available yet to let you do that. I guess you could petition sub to add more scripts:

ScreenSaverStart.bat - called upon screen saver initiation
ScreenSaverExit.bat - called when screen saver is cleared

So then you could put an ir-blaster command in each that would turn off and turn on the TV. Users who's screens would respond properly to the windows screen-off command could just use a PowerCfg command to accomplish the same.

[Reddwarf]

johnsonx42 has a good idea, wort asking Sub for.

However there is NO golden rule saying that you SHOULD turn off the light whenever you leave a room. If the lightsource is FL or CFL, you will shorten the lifetime drasticly if you turn it on and off 10 - 20 times a day, and it will cost you far more to buy a new one that you have saved in energy by turning it off.

[Elmo Putney]

I agree it won't neccsarily make full finacial sense to power the TV down when the screen saver kicks in, but it is an interesting idea.....and I still think by the time the backlight dies due to swithcing on and off then I'm probably in the "window" for a replacement anyway.

Perhaps there are other things that would be useful to kick off when when the screensaver kicks in, perhaps comskip, backup, or something...tbh I cant think of much it would be useful for other than my orignal request.

Sub, any interest?

[re-Barr]

My tv has a feature that can be turned on where it shuts off if there is no input for like 10 min. I then have windows turn off the monitor after 20 min which makes the tv inactivity timer start. so thirty minutes total the tv will shut down. It has never shut down during playback. It works pretty well actually. You may want to see if there is something like that in the menu of your tv. My wife is notorious for exiting to the main menu and walking off.

[sub]

I've added support for running ScreenSaverStart.bat and ScreenSaverStop.bat in the next release, if they exist in the scripts directory.