[mythtv-users] Shutdown directtv box when idle

John Sutherland garionphx at gmail.com
Wed Oct 4 15:57:27 UTC 2006


On Oct 3, 2006, at 9:40 PM, Michael T. Dean wrote:

> On 10/03/06 23:22, John Sutherland wrote:
>
>> Hi guys.. I have my myth backend setup on a machine that needs to be
>> up 24/7.. Its connected to a directv tuner via PVR350..
>>
>> What i would like to do is to turn off the tuner (in an effort to
>> save elect costs) when Myth is idle.. But not shut myth down..
>>
>
> I doubt turning it off will save any electricity.  Now, if you can rig
> up a system to unplug it when not in use...  A large percentage of
> consumer household appliances consume as much (or at least nearly as
> much) power when off as they do when on.
>

<snip>

Well, I'm just trying to do what I can.. I have noticed a difference  
in the heat generated by the box when its on compared to when its  
off.. So I'm figuring there's a difference in the elect usage.. I  
live in Phoenix,AZ, so I would like to generate as little heat as a  
possibly can.. Why pay for the elect twice, generating the heat, then  
removing it with the AC..

In any case... I know how to turn the box on and off via scripts..  
But I can't figure out MythTV's idle system... There's stuff to be  
able to shutdown the backend, but it assumes that something else  
(BIOS or otherwise) will turn it back on...

I can shut the box down by changing the shutdown script.. And the box  
comes back on when I go to record.. *But*.. Once it shuts the box  
down once, it seems that myth is in some sort of "I'm shutting down"  
state, and won't shut the box down again (in other words, it doesn't  
idle again..)..

I'm thinking something like this could be useful for folks who dont  
mind the elect usage, if they wanna run SETI or something like that  
when t he machine is idle, but dont want myth to shutdown.....

What would be cool is if Myth had a query inthe protocol to ask it if  
its in idle mode.. then folks could write their own daemons, use cron  
to query, etc..

--John



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