Windows 7: Win 7 entering standby during video playback

Hi all,

I discovered I have the following problem with Windows 7. The system is set to go to standby after 45 minutes.

However whenever I play videos from the preferred players (XBMC, VLC) the system goes to standby after 45 mins of playback, which is not intended. This only doesn't happen with WMP, ie only WMP works correctly, disabling standby on video playback.

I have run twice powercfg - energy, once with vlc running and once with wmp running, the main differences being the following:

VLC
System Availability Requestsisplay Required Request
The program has made a request to prevent the display from automatically entering a low-power mode.
Requesting Process \Device\HarddiskVolume3\Program Files (x86)\VideoLAN\VLC\vlc.exe

WMP
System Availability Requests:System Required Request
The program has made a request to prevent the system from automatically entering sleep.
Requesting Process \Device\HarddiskVolume3\Program Files (x86)\Windows Media Player\wmplayer.exe

As you can see wmp correctly prevents the system from going into standby, while vlc doesn't. Is there any way to correct this, ie manually via powercfg command?



Using Windows 7 x64.

Many thanks for your replies.

Silkman

Attaching html logfiles

Set the standby to "never". That is your safest bet.

I know. But with a 850W PSU, will you pay my electric bill?

I'm wondering what the actual savings from "standby" amount to?

As near as I can calculate, my system costs about $39 a year to operate, assuming it is on 11 hours a day. That is without standby or hibernation or any type of power saving plan.

And as far as I know, the wattage rating of the PSU has nothing to do with power consumption. What matters is power draw from the socket and efficiency.

Exactly

Thanks for the replies everyone so far, however I would welcome any replies regarding the OT.

I, too, have seen the same symptom... but in the costume of "hibernation" rather than "sleep". I can be running my backups, and as long as I haven't touched the keyboard or mouse for the specified time interval the system just decides it's ok to go into hibernation... RIGHT IN THE MIDDLE OF A BACKUP!!!

And yet, there do appear to be components from Microsoft (WMP and WMC in particular) that do seem to prevent these sleep/hibernate functions from kicking in. Apparently these Microsoft components count as keyboard/mouse "touches", whereas 3rd-party vendor products do not.

I don't know of anyway around this, other than what's already been suggested namely to just disable sleep/hibernation during the time period that you're running your backups or watching your videos. You can put it back to whatever you want after you're done... if you want sleep/hibernate to happen automatically

Alternatively, my backup software allows running a command-file before and after the job, so I can take advantage of that and run the "powercfg.exe" program to disable or enable whatever I want whenever I want.


But my true solution is simply to specify "NEVER" for both sleep and hibernation. I don't want Windows interfering with anything I'm doing, ever! Instead I use HIBERNATION, entered manually, when I don't need my machine for an extended period.

If I know I'm going out for the afternoon or evening and don't need the machine then I will MANUALLY ENTER HIBERNATION. Hibernation is, of course, the safest way to go into any type of "offline" status, and is also obviously the best way to truly maximize power savings (namely... THE MACHINE IS POWERED OFF). Coming back from hibernation is not as fast as coming back from sleep (which is fine by me), but significantly faster (which is good) than coming all the way back up from true cold "shut down".

I've never used sleep. Doesn't really turn the machine off, and while it's a lower-power state it still is not OFF. When I am not going to be using my computer for a while I want total quiet and no noise at all, no heat generated, and virtually zero electricity being used. That's hibernation (and I also power my monitors and speakers off as I leave the room).

Thanks for your reply.

I ended up creating a batch file + windows task that checks whether xbmc.exe (or any program/process for that matter) is running and if it is, sets the active power plan to "always on". It the process isn't running, it sets the power to balanced, which has the 45 min standby rule.

This task runs every 10 minutes with system privileges so nothing shows to the user session.


Also, trust me when I say that having pcs running 24/7 is more than 39$ (or any currency equivalent) a year. My brother run in the past 4-5 servers out of old pcs, and the bill was out of this world. Of course my parents paid the bill at the time. Only when he left house and took the machines with him did the bill go down in half from about 350eur / month. That's why one of the problems datacenters face apart from space is electricity supply. Putting more and more machines, even blade servers in a building at some point you will reach the point that the electricity company will have to build a substation to accomodate for the increased supply...

Could we have a small tutorial on setting this up please?