MCE Standby Tool 0.9.69: native MP support

[hveijk]

At first MST was designed for Windows XP MCE 2005 systems, nowadays it can be very useful when fighting standby issues on any Windows XP, 2003 or sometimes even Vista systems.

Some of you might already have been using the MCE Standby Tool (MST) for its configuration options.

The latest release now has native MediaPortal support (as suggested by an MP team member).

It can close MediaPortal on suspend and restart it on resume. After closing and before restarting MP the screen will be blanked to reduce the "PC-experience" as much as possible.

For most MCE systems closing the shell on suspend dramatically increases the reliability of te standby functionality. Several MediaPortal users reported the need of closing MP manually on suspend, now MST can be used for that.

A few Team-MediaPortal members where kind enough to test this version, after several weeks of problem free running its time to release.

More info, screenshots and downloads can be found here: Slick Solutions - Home of the MCE Standby Tool

Any comments, questions and complements are welcome,

Enjoy this new release,

Herman van Eijk

[Paranoid Delusion]

It can close MediaPortal on suspend and restart it on resume.

Just what a lot of the USB device drivers required, have been using PVR-Scheduler mainly for its ability to do this function.

Thanks Herman for the update.

[rtv]

Yeah but unless PVR-Scheduler it's free and doesn't depend on the version of MP Nice to have a central place where all options / workarounds regarding standby can be used.

Although I do not have "real" issues with standby itself my hw accelerated deinterlacing is worse (micro stutters) when MP has not been restarted. Therefore I am glad to have MST now

Thx Herman!

[Fabolus]

Thank you, Hveijk.
Your program is a very easy way to resolve standby problems.

[hveijk]

So many thanks for my first post here, now that’s a warm welcome!

I recently discovered an issue that some MediaPortal users might experience.

On non XP MCE 2005 systems MST once shows an "Invalid argument to time encode" exception when installing. It only occurs in specific time zones and is completely harmless.

Its resolved by now, the next release will no longer suffer from this.

Herman

[kiesow]

Great tool, I would love to use it but ...

If I start mst i get the error "the ordinal 24 could not be located in the dynamic link library powrprof.dll". Maybe it's because I use WinXP 64?

[hveijk]

Originally Posted by kiesow

Great tool, I would love to use it but ...

If I start mst i get the error "the ordinal 24 could not be located in the dynamic link library powrprof.dll". Maybe it's because I use WinXP 64?

Sorry, my Fault,

This occurs when running on WinXP 64 and server 2003.
It should not happen, I introduced this when I was doing some experiments.

Next (test) release will no longer suffer from this.

Please keep me informed on how it runs on WinXP64, I am very curious about that.

Herman

[cheetah05]

Hi there,

I developed something similar - but nowhere near as good or advanced as MST for personal use.

It just has the stuff I need from MST and a little thing extra for my TV.

It might be of some use to the people that are on 64-bit or Vista etc.....as it is written in .NET. So as long as you have the .NET framework (needed for MP anyways) you should be OK.

Controls:

Q - quit the program.
O - bring up options screen - brought up automatically when first run.
S - manually start media portal.

Its attached.

Thanks.

[idioteque]

Force reboots
Select if and how often your system will be forced to reboot. Running a Windows system for a long period sometimes makes it cranky or even unstable. A reboot now and then will give you a "fresh" system. When the systems returns to standby after an automated task (guide update or scheduled recording), MST checks if its time for a reboot. If so, it will cancel the standby process and force the system to reboot. When the system comes back up MST puts the system into standby. On most systems this means the reboot is done right after the guide update.


Can this perhaps be scheduled by time, as in around 00:00 AM

[hveijk]

@cheetah05

Looks pretty good for a fix just for personal use. I am sure it will be useful for people experiencing problems like yours.

Would you like to share the details of your “TV problem” and how you fixed it?

Do you think it might be of any use for MCE user as well?

@idioteque

I am trying to keep the configuration options MST as low as possible (without loosing any functionality of course).

On MCE the guide update (which is often done a night) is a perfect occasion to do the reboot so there was no need for scheduling it.

Currently I am improving support for non MCE Windows versions (with or without MediaPortal). Waking the system for reboots now makes more sense so I will look into this. (Its no top priority though).

@kiesow

The XP64 problem is fixed, thanks for testing.

Others who would like to try the latest test build which has improved support for several Windows versions (Server 2003, XP64 and Vista) can find it here:

mst0971t.zip

Herman