How can a program determine if STV service is active (record or play)?

[timg11]

My Windows 7 32bit SageTV system has lost the ability to automatically sleep when idle. It has been sleeping and waking to record shows consistently for a couple of years, but started remaining awake continually a month or two ago. Nothing has changed (no new SW, HW or drivers), except the standard Windows updates.

The system is still able to sleep when I manually initiate sleep, and will wake and run properly. (more details)

I've reached the end of the line in terms of debugging the problem, so I want to implement a more active solution.

Basically, I want to run a scheduled task at 5 minutes past every hour. If the system is in use, or SageTV is playing or recording then do nothing. Otherwise, the task puts the system to sleep with "Rundll32.exe Powrprof.dll,SetSuspendState Sleep"

I think I could detect if the HD300 is connected for playback by parsing the output of NETSTAT. In case somebody is using the computer locally, I can check SystemParametersInfo to see if the monitor is in standby. I'd still pop up a dialog to allow the sleep to be cancelled, just in case.

My question is, how can an external program detect if SageTV (Service mode) is recording or preparing to record? I think this was discussed here before, but I can't find it now.

[BobPhoenix]

Originally Posted by timg11

My Windows 7 32bit SageTV system has lost the ability to automatically sleep when idle. It has been sleeping and waking to record shows consistently for a couple of years, but started remaining awake continually a month or two ago. Nothing has changed (no new SW, HW or drivers), except the standard Windows updates.

The system is still able to sleep when I manually initiate sleep, and will wake and run properly. (more details)

I've reached the end of the line in terms of debugging the problem, so I want to implement a more active solution.

Basically, I want to run a scheduled task at 5 minutes past every hour. If the system is in use, or SageTV is playing or recording then do nothing. Otherwise, the task puts the system to sleep with "Rundll32.exe Powrprof.dll,SetSuspendState Sleep"

I think I could detect if the HD300 is connected for playback by parsing the output of NETSTAT. In case somebody is using the computer locally, I can check SystemParametersInfo to see if the monitor is in standby. I'd still pop up a dialog to allow the sleep to be cancelled, just in case.

My question is, how can an external program detect if SageTV (Service mode) is recording or preparing to record? I think this was discussed here before, but I can't find it now.

Use the SageAPI by calling the SageX plugin to check if Sage is doing something. You should be able to tell if an extender is connected, if anything is recording and if anything is streaming.

[timg11]

Thanks for the pointer to SageX.

I finally found the root cause of the insomnia. We wanted to look at some photos on a server using the HD-300, and we added a folder on a server as a Sage Import Directory for Photos. When done, we left it configured in setup and forgot about it.

That is enough to prevent the system from ever sleeping again, even though it doesn't show up in POWERCFG -requests.