Based on some helpful feedback from Klaus, I simplified my suspend patch. The interface to the solid-state relay will be moved to a separate plugin. There are so many ways to control relays from a PC that it is best to write plugins for relay interfaces as the need arises. The patch introduces three config.h variables, which are 0 by default, and exposed in the Setup/Miscellanous panel: PowerSuspend: 1=enable the Power button control the Suspend flag, 0=normal Suspend: 1=suspend audio and video playback, 0=normal SuspendShutdownWait: After playback was suspended by pressing the Power button, wait this many seconds until shutting down vdr. This feature is disabled if SuspendShutdownWait=0 or PowerSuspend=0 or no -s option is given to vdr. The patch is available at: http://www.funet.fi/~msmakela/software/vdr/vdr-1.3.32-suspend-0.3.patch.gz When compiling, be sure to pass SUSPEND_PATCH=1 to make. The page http://www.funet.fi/~msmakela/software/vdr/ currently documents the previous version of the patch. I will write a relay-control plugin and rewrite my "runvdr" script at some later time. On my system (900 MHz Celeron, 256 MB, vdr, softdevice, DirectFB on Matrox G450), suspending playback cuts the power consumption by 15 to 20 VA, about 20 % of the apparent power consumed when one hard disk is spinning. The power consumption would probably drop more on processors equipped with frequency scaling and thermal throttling. I plan to repeat the measurements with a better instrument that displays actual power consumption in watts instead of apparent power (volt-amps). Marko
