Warn of recording in progress when attempting to restart or shut down PC? (1 Viewer)

chemoul

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Is there a way to warn the user that an active recording is in progress when attempting to shut down or restart the PC where Mediaportal is installed?

Coming from Windows Mediacenter, this was a feature, however I realize that Mediaportal maybe can't be quite as tightly integrated into Windows as WMC was?

If it's not possible, what's the quickest way to check if Mediaportal is recording? (WMC showed a red recording button in the systray for example).
 

CyberSimian

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    there a way to warn the user that an active recording is in progress when attempting to shut down or restart the PC where Mediaportal is installed?
    I am not a Windows expert, but my understanding is that it is possible for an application to tell Windows that the application wants to receive notification messages when the system is about to shutdown, hibernate, or sleep.

    When a shutdown message is received, the application is supposed to stop processing in an orderly fashion, and then tell Windows that shutdown can proceed. The problem is that a badly-behaved application might fail to tell Windows to proceed with the shutdown. So there is a timeout associated with the shutdown message -- if the application does not respond within this timeout (60 seconds, perhaps), Windows continues with shutdown anyway. The upshot is that an application cannot prevent shutdown. So the onus is on the user to notice that a recording is in progress, and not initiate shutdown.

    WMC showed a red recording button in the systray
    The red dot in the system tray is a good solution for this problem, although I would extend this to a yellow dot if a recording is about to start within the next "n" seconds (where "n" should be configurable by the user to a value within the range 1 to 1000 seconds).

    As far as I know, no such utility exists to display the red dot for MP. Perhaps someone with the necessary programming skills would be interested in writing one?

    If it's not possible, what's the quickest way to check if Mediaportal is recording?
    Start the MP client and see if a red dot is displayed on the "Home" panel. Most/all MP1 skins do this, but I don't know whether MP2 skins do.

    -- from CyberSimian in the UK
     

    CyberSimian

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    I used to use this for MP1.
    I tried this on MP1, and it seems to work quite well. It provides the red dot in the system tray, and has a "stop shutdown" setting to stop shutdown if TV Server is recording. (y)

    The red dot changes colour to indicate different states, but sadly does not indicate that a recording is about to start in the near future :(. This would be a useful enhancement.

    The "stop shutdown" function truly stops shutdown, and the user is forced to interact with the system (either cancelling shutdown or allowing it to proceed immediately). A possible enhancement would be to change this to "delay shutdown", so that shutdown would complete when the recording had finished.

    Hibernation is similar to shutdown in that it terminates prematurely any recordings that are currently in progress. Sadly, hibernation is not stopped by the "TV Server Monitor". There may be a reason for this, but the reason does not occur to me at present. So I think that a useful enhancement would be to treat hibernation the same as shutdown.

    Finally, I did try the "TV Server Monitor" on my MP2 system, but without success. Unfortunately, I recently changed the networking setup in my HTPC by installing a second network adapter. MP1 did not notice at all (TV Server still works), but MP2 does notice, and the MP2 TV Server no longer provides live TV or an EPG.

    If you want to use MP2, it might be worth trying for yourself, but you need to place the "TV Server Monitor" files in the correct folder. The monitor needs to use some TV Server DLLs, so I think that the correct folder is probably the one containing the "SlimTV" plugin. But if some of the TV Server DLLs have different names in MP2, the monitor won't be able to find them and it won't work.

    -- from CyberSimian in the UK
     

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