Suspend and resume with SageTV

[mwhitlock]

• Prevent manual suspend/hibernate while recording
• Suspend system immediately after all recordings have finished if SageWake woke system to record and user has not returned

I strongly recommend that everyone upgrade their SageWake to this version. I have solved the problem of the system not falling asleep again after Sage has awakened it once, (I think). I also cleaned up a little code and changed the way in which SageWake calls SetThreadExecutionState so that it no longer uses ES_CONTINUOUS, which was causing problems with the power management idle timers resetting after an auto-resume.

EDIT: See below for latest version.

[mwhitlock]

Alex0230 wrote on 03-21-2004 09:15 PM:
Will this restart any program that I feed in to sagewake and when you restart how are you killing it? Do you search to see if the process is running, kill it, then run the process passed in. Are they run in the order received.

I want to use a combination of the ramdisk and sagewake and my own program in order to get some kind of stable power management system going. Becacuse I'm not doing network activity, I've been able to get it to a point where if I put my wiz bin file out on a ram disk, this system will standby on its own.

What I would like to do is for sagewake to be the program that restarts my batch file that copies over the sage program to the ramdisk which then runs sage.

sageWake --restart "C:\cleanupSage.bat,C:\startSage.bat"

CleanupSage.bat would do what the end up startSage.bat would normally do. This copies the files from the ramdisk back to the hard drive at the end of every sage run.

Let me know if this PM makes sense, my mind is .....this last week was supposed to be my spring break...but it's been anything but a break... I hope that sageWake was made generic enough to handle any parameters passed in to the restart section...let me know...

Thanks..

Alex,

When you specify the --restart option, SageWake will find and quit all instances of SageTV and SageRecorder, regardless of what programs you have listed in your restart list. It first attempts to shut down these instances gracefully by sending them WM_QUIT messages, but if they are hung or fail to respond, it will terminate them forcefully with TerminateProcess.

After all instances of SageTV and SageRecorder have terminated, SageWake will then start executing programs in your restart list. It does call CreateProcess on these paths in the order you've listed them, but note that it does not wait after creating the first listed process before moving on to the second. So effectively, they all get started at roughly the same time. If you have a second batch file that you need to start only the first one is finished, you'll have to implement some kind of delay in the second batch file yourself.

If you start your instances of SageTV and SageRecorder from the batch file, you don't need to specify them in your restart list to SageWake.

EDIT: Also note that you NEED an equals sign between --restart and your list of paths enclosed in quotes!!

[Alex0230]

cool...thanks!! This might help me find develop a power management routine for sage......

Here is what I'm doing:

I've created a ram disk of 32MB, Z:.

SageStart.bat -- copies all the Sage program files to the ram disk and launches SageTv from the ram disk and waits till Sage is exited, once it is exited the files that have changed one the ramdisk are copied back to the hard disk.

SageWake is run on startup with the parametes --leadtime=60 --restart="F:\SageStart.bat"

If in the event that sagewake does not exit sageTv in a way that the batch file can clean up itself. (the way it is designed to) I'll just add a cleanup batch file to 'SageWake--leadtime=60 --restart="F:\CleanUpSage.bat,F:\SageStart.bat"'.

I will also have a program running in the background that I will write that every few hours will copy the differences from the ramdisk to the local hard drive, only if sage isn't sleeping. The easiest way to do this is to check to see if there are changes in the video folder.

Because I'm not using the network for sage...my system will be able to standby and resume from standby to record thanks to sagewake (mwhitlock) and the ramdisk (nielm)

[jptaz]

Originally posted by falchulk
If yo use s3, no processes are terminated and restarted. What advantage do yuo get from bibernate? Durning s3 the only thing consuming powe is the ram.

You missed the whole point of why I need to restart everything.
If you looked earlier the reason I need to restart SageTV and all the SageRecorder instances it has to do with Actisys IR Blaster and USB Uirt not working after either S3 Suspend or S4 Hibernate. Also my system has two fans in the power supply and two case fans that will not go off in suspend. This computer is in my bed room/Office while I am remodeling my master bede room so I like being able sleep without all the noise.

So it does not matter to me how fast these things start again, I only want them to happen once in a while and not every couple minutes because the Client was left alone for a few minutes. So Hibernate needs to happen after 30 minutes of no activity.

On a more positive note I found a solution to my problem.
I found a program called RS Somnifero http://www.ricosoftware.net/en/index.htm.

This program lets you specify an action to take if the CPU is not above a certain percentage for a period of time. On my system setting it to 10% and whatever timeout lets my system hibernate. I will probably set this to about 20 minutes. It fails to hibernate if something is recording thanks to the latest update to SageWake

Thanks again,
John

[mwhitlock]

John, you should check your BIOS configuration. If you have an option to enable suspend-to-RAM, you should turn it on. If you don't have that option, then see if you can choose "S3" as your standby power state; it's the same as suspend-to-RAM. Then when your system goes into standby, your motherboard will put your power supply in standby as well and your noisy fans will stop. Most power supplies provide a maximum of 2 Amps of current at 5 Volts in standby, meaning your system would be drawing 10 Watts of power at max while suspended in S3.

Just to be sure, you aren't complaining about the new SageWake, right? You like the fact that SageWake prevents RS Somnifero from putting the system into hibernation while Sage is recording, correct?

[falchulk]

Jpatz, if your fans are on, you are using s1, which is just a low power state, not s3. With S3, it looks as if your system is completely off. Depending on how you configure it in cmos any key or certin keys will retun it in approx 5 sec. If you are doing anything on the system it should not go into standby to begin with.

FYI, early on I had an issue with the nvidia drivers that would produce a black screen in sage after it returned from standby. I used girder to close sage when it detected the pc was entering standby and restart it when it returned. The drivers have since elimintated my need for this. Is this what you are doing?

[jphhughes]

I know its been stated by mwhitlock that he has not tested Sagewake with the current release of SageTV 1.4.1. Does anyone have it working with current release. Thanks

[jptaz]

Originally posted by mwhitlock
John, you should check your BIOS configuration. If you have an option to enable suspend-to-RAM, you should turn it on. If you don't have that option, then see if you can choose "S3" as your standby power state; it's the same as suspend-to-RAM. Then when your system goes into standby, your motherboard will put your power supply in standby as well and your noisy fans will stop. Most power supplies provide a maximum of 2 Amps of current at 5 Volts in standby, meaning your system would be drawing 10 Watts of power at max while suspended in S3.

Just to be sure, you aren't complaining about the new SageWake, right? You like the fact that SageWake prevents RS Somnifero from putting the system into hibernation while Sage is recording, correct?

Nope not complaining about new SageWake one bit...it is great.

RS Somnifero will only hibernate/suspend if I am not recording, which is desired.

As far as S3 in Bios. I setup S3 in the BIOS and it does indeed turn off most fans in the system, but not all of them.

The big problem with S3 I was having last night was that the only way I was able to wake was by hitting the power on my PC. The keyboard and mouse did not wake the system. It was getting late when I was playing with it so I may have done something wrong. Also it did not seem to wake up all the hard drives right away even though I had hard Drive Power Down Set to Never.

If I can get the S3 Suspend to wake using the keyboard and figure out why all the drives don't come online right away I will probably use it since it does actually turn off all but 1 fan which is good enough and with RS Somnifero I can have the system suspend when I want it to. I did have to set the CPU threshold to 25% as occasionally the 5 minute timer in SageTV that scans the directories goes over 10%.

I did manager to create a batch file on my SageTV Client PC that I linked to a remote button for starting SageTVClient. It pings the SageTV System to wake it from Hibernate/Suspend then does a ping on the local host for about a minute and half to let the SageTV System come online and Sagewake Restarts all the Sage Instances and then kills RS Somnifero and relaunches it as unfortunately once it hibernates/suspends it does not restart its timers. I have a couple ideas of how to work around this issue, but we will see.

Thanks for all your ideas and help,
John

[jptaz]

Originally posted by jphhughes
I know its been stated by mwhitlock that he has not tested Sagewake with the current release of SageTV 1.4.1. Does anyone have it working with current release. Thanks

I use it with 1.4.1 without any problems....errr....well other than SageTV not letting my system sleep because of my network encoder. But it does work perfectly if I have it suspend at 3 minutes.

[jptaz]

Originally posted by falchulk
Jpatz, if your fans are on, you are using s1, which is just a low power state, not s3. With S3, it looks as if your system is completely off. Depending on how you configure it in cmos any key or certin keys will retun it in approx 5 sec. If you are doing anything on the system it should not go into standby to begin with.

FYI, early on I had an issue with the nvidia drivers that would produce a black screen in sage after it returned from standby. I used girder to close sage when it detected the pc was entering standby and restart it when it returned. The drivers have since elimintated my need for this. Is this what you are doing?

Yes I was using S1, because I could not for the life of my figure which key I had to hit to wake it. My wireless keyboard has a sleep button, but that didn't do it and nothing else seemed to work. I may have not understood the bios, but the keyboard wake options were win98 keyboard - didn't work with my sleep button and I don't have a power button which is what it says to use. password - no idea what this means...it was late so maybe it will make more sense tonight.

Actually mwhitlock added the Close of all SageTV and SageRecorder instances and relaunches them. This is a great feature and has made power management possible. I guess if I was motivated I could have modified JMans program to do this or girder, but previously my SageTV box was in my office where I did not sleep so I didn't really care enough to do the work. Now that I sleep 15 feet from my computer making it quiet is more of a priority. I have seven 7200 RPM drives so very loud.

Thanks for the ideas...I will play with S3 more tonight and hopefully figure it out.

John

[mwhitlock]

Note that with most motherboards, enabling the keyboard to wake the system from S3 requires two modifications. You have to enable it in the BIOS and you also have to change a jumper on the motherboard. RTFM for more info. ;-)

[mwhitlock]

Wow, it makes a lot more sense to shut down SageTV and SageRecorder instances during preparation for standby and start them back up upon resume. Why didn't I think of that?!

[falchulk]

mwhitlock, if that comment was diected at me, I had not read all of your notes in these thrads. I apologize. I assure you though, this is not an oriiginal idea. I and others have been doing this fo some months. If you would like to verify it,just search.

[mwhitlock]

• Greater control over which processes are terminated upon suspend
• Suppress logging of multiple identical NextRecording events
• Fix: minor bug involving scheduled recordings spanning a year change
• Fix: possible premature suspend immediately after system resumes to record when Sage updates schedule file before recording actually begins

Note the important change in the command line options for this release!
There are now two separate options controlling termination and execution of processes on suspend and resume. You can now specify which window classes you want to send quit messages to during suspend preparation. Additionally, you can have processes start upon system resume without necessarily having any processes terminate upon suspend. In short, the list of processes to kill and the list of processes to start are now independent.

Typical example:
SageWake --terminate="SageApp,RecorderApp" --execute="C:\SageTV\SageTV.exe,C:\SageRecorder\SageRecorder.exe"

This would mimic the behavior of previous versions of SageWake by terminating instances of SageTV and SageRecorder when the system goes into suspend and starting them back up when the system resumes. The slight difference is that now the termination occurs just before the system suspends rather than just after it resumes.

You aren't limited to just SageApp and RecorderApp for your window classes to terminate. Any program that creates a window with a unique window class can be terminated by SageWake. This should be good news for jptaz who needs to restart RS Somnifero with every suspend/resume cycle.

EDIT: See below for latest version.

[jphhughes]

Perhaps I missed something along the way, so I would appreciate any help. It is my understanding that Sagewake purpose is to wake up SageTV when the computer is in standby mode to allow schedule recording to take place. When it does this it restarts SageTV so that devises like my usb-uirt will be initialized by Sage and continue to work with SageTV. The problem I am having is that my PC will not go into standby automatically. Prior to the latest version of Sagewake When I put the Pc in standby manually it would not automatically come out of standby, however if I manually woke it up then Sagewake would restart SageTV and so forth. I tested several condition under which the PC would go and not go into standby/ The results in my case were:

1. with outlook and VPN running PC would NOT go into Standby
2. SageTV running (without Sagewake) the PC would NOT go into standby
3. with Sagewake 1.2.1 running (without SageTV) the PC would NOT go into standby
4. with SageTV in sleep mode (and Sagewake not running) the PC WILL go into standby.
5. with SageTV running with Sagewake PC will NOT go into Standby.

So it seems to me that item 2 say's that Sagewake is keeping the PC from going into standby in which case it will never get to do it thing. Again tell me where I am going wrong. I would like very much to get the pc to enter standby and have Sagewake do its thing..

[mwhitlock]

The only time SageWake actively prevents the system from entering standby is while SageTV is recording something.

Are you using Intelligent Recording in SageTV? If not, you definitely need to specify --noir on SageWake's command line. Without this, SageWake may be preventing the system from sleeping because there is an Intelligent Recording scheduled at the present time. Even if Intelligent Recording is turned off in SageTV, the schedule file will still contain Intelligent Recordings and SageWake will see them. If you specify --noir, SageWake will ignore Intelligent Recordings in the schedule file.

[mwhitlock]

• Report show name in log when system resumes to record

The crash bug I had reported here prior to this edit was a false alarm. It only existed in an intermediate version of SageWake that I never released, so nevermind.

EDIT: See below for latest version.

[jphhughes]

mwhitlock

Well the command line option "noir" did the trick, it completed a complete cycle. System went into automatic standby came out of standby two minutes prior to recording (as instructed) restarted SageTV and recorded the show, then went back into standby. Thanks for your help with this issue. Also thank you for this program it enhances the usability of SageTV.

[Alex0230]

Originally posted by mwhitlock
--terminate="SageApp,RecorderApp"

How do you determine these Window classes? Are they the Form captions or the process names. For example if I run a 'runme.bat', it creates a window. Would its window class be 'runme' or is it "C:\Windows\System32\cmd.exe"?

Maybe a batch file is a batch example.....

What if I had foo.exe though, that created a window with the form caption "Test Window". What would be my window class in this instance.

I'm just not seeing where you get SageApp from SageTv.exe, that's all....

Thanks....

Alex

Also:

Say I'm using a batch file that waits for sage to finish running then after sage exits it cleans up some files. When sageWake --terminates SageTV, will there be enough time for my batch file to cleanup before standby/hibernate. It needs about 5-10 seconds to clean up or do you think this will disrupt the sleeping process.

Originally posted by mwhitlock
Are you using Intelligent Recording in SageTV? If not, you definitely need to specify --noir on SageWake's command line. Without this, SageWake may be preventing the system from sleeping because there is an Intelligent Recording scheduled at the present time. Even if Intelligent Recording is turned off in SageTV, the schedule file will still contain Intelligent Recordings and SageWake will see them. If you specify --noir, SageWake will ignore Intelligent Recordings in the schedule file.

Now I know where are those miscellaneous filings were coming from, very good point!! I just wanted to highlite that again for others to see.

[jptaz]

Originally posted by Alex0230
How do you determine these Window classes? Are they the Form captions or the process names. For example if I run a 'runme.bat', it creates a window. Would its window class be 'runme' or is it "C:\Windows\System32\cmd.exe"?

Maybe a batch file is a batch example.....

What if I had foo.exe though, that created a window with the form caption "Test Window". What would be my window class in this instance.

I'm just not seeing where you get SageApp from SageTv.exe, that's all....

Alex,

Finding class names requires a tool to find out what they. In MS Visual Studio 6 a tool called Spy++ is used to find this information. Command line programs are not easy to close as it would close all command windows you had open. I don't believe this tool is public so it may be difficult for non programmers to obtain.