Warn Of TV Recording (1 Viewer)

[jestermgee]

I am trying to setup a "green" HTPC system that does not waste power. I have a centram media server that is chock full of HDDs and only ever needed when my HTPC needs to access some media. It is powered on automatically when the HTPC is powered up from S3 slumber by a WOL batch script and runs a small batch script to monitor the presence of the HTPC on the network. When it is offline, the server shuts down.... Brilliant!

The issue I am faced with at the moment is I do not use MP exclusivly. It has the task of doing my TV recording and what not. My HTPC runs hibernator and will auto switch off the machine when idol for 30 minutes or I can press the power button...

BUT.....

my HTPC also has the TV card that I use for recording. If recording, this produces enough disk activity to prevent the HTPC from sleeping, but not from being manually shut down. Because another user may be using the HTPC, there could be some recording happening in the background that no one is aware of and because MP is not open to see the record symbol its possible to shut down the system while recording.

I was wondering if there was some tool that could display a message when the PC tried to be shut down to warn that recordings are active or that a scheduled recording is set to start in 30 minutes and prevent the machine from being shutdown.

 

[jestermgee]

OK, so how about this:

Slick Solutions - LEDSdriver

and-81 (I believe) has created a standalone applocation that ads an icon in the taskbar to show the status of the TV server. It shows RED when recording, Yellow when updating EPG and blue when idle.

Would there be any way to have something like this or an extra feature of this to control an LED to indicate when the system is recording like on a VCR?