[mythtv-users] Power off STB: a new twist from our local cable provider

Ronald Frazier ron at ronfrazier.net
Sat Jan 9 23:55:29 UTC 2010


On Sat, Jan 9, 2010 at 4:40 PM, Christian Szpilfogel
<chrisznews4 at rogers.com> wrote:
> If my STB has been on for a while they start displaying "Press any key to
> watch TV".

Please don't "bump" your post (especially after just an hour).

Are you sure this problem happens based on how long the box has been
on? The typical thing I see is that it's based on how long it's been
since a button was pressed...as long as you press a button every hour
or two, it's fine. If my suspicion is correct, then the best course of
action would be to see if there is a button you can press which won't
actually do anything (cancel or escape may be the best bet) and cron
it up to run automatically at set intervals (and pick an odd time,
like 12 minutes after the hour, just so you aren't likely to activate
it at the same time a channel change happens.


If you want to take the route of checking the backend for when a
recording stops/changes, you can do so with a simple perl script and
the perl bindings. Heres a start:

use MythTV;
my $mythtv = new MythTV;
my $status = $mythtv->status_command();
my @statuslines = split(/[\n\r]+/, $status);
my @encoders = grep(/Encoder \d+ is/, @statuslines);
print join("\n", @encoders)'

That will query the backend and print out the lines that tell you the
status of all the encoders. I leave it up to you to figure out how to
track them and see when they change, or to parse out the time a
current recording is scheduled to end.


-- 
Ron


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