On Wed, Sep 14, 2005 at 11:24:03PM +0100, Tony Houghton wrote: > My VDR box is connected only to my TV with no keyboard or mouse, and I > use the DVB card's remote to control it when I'm watching things on it. > But I don't want it playing TV all the time, because I'm only watching > it for a fraction of the time it's switched on, because I also use it > for long downloads, running it remotely with VNC and ssh. As the system > has a budget DVB card and Matrox G450 I would normally use softdevice > [1], and the significant CPU usage would be a nuisance and possibly > enough to make a difference to my electricity bill. So I'd really like a > suspend feature. There is the suspend-output plugin, but I don't think > you can make it start up suspended, and it hasn't caught up with recent > changes to VDR, at least not of last week. So, essentially you have the same hardware as me. I do have a keyboard connected for quick hacking tasks, but it is normally not used. Have you given my suspend patch a try? http://www.funet.fi/~msmakela/software/vdr/vdr-1.3.32-suspend-0.3.patch.gz is the newest version. The previous version of the patch controls the suspend flag with a command-line option. In the new patch, the flag is a setup.conf option. I'm still using the previous patch myself, because I haven't written a relay-control plugin yet. (On my box, the monitor and speakers remain powered off when playback is suspended.) > [1] I can't even do that for now, because I use it for watching > downloaded TV programmes too, and softplay isn't working with those ATM. I haven't tried softplay, as I only have DVB recordings, not even DVDs. > So I use the xine plugin for output without running xine and just use > vdr as a recording daemon with vdradmin; or would vdr function without > an output device at all? Yes, vdr does work without an output device, and even without a DVB tuner card, although it will keep complaining during live stream view in the latter case. Without an output device, you can enter commands via svdrp. When my dxr3 card died this spring, I made some recordings in this way until I migrated to a more powerful machine that could run softdevice. Marko
