Allow for power save on monitors?

[QRUXEL]

Hi!

I know this question/request feels quite opposite of what you'd probably want, so first let me explain why this is an issue for us.

We have a TV studio with 8 screens connected to a single PC running Resolume Avenue. All our production PC's have power save disabled in windows but instead I've set up a script that manually sends a "Turn Monitors Off" command to all PC's. I run this script every evening before we close up shop.

My problem is that it seams like Resolume Avenue (and I'm guessing also Arena) have a feature that actively turns on the screens again if it has entered power save. So currently I have to connect to the PC and shutdown Avenue before I run the script and.. I'm a lazy person so I'd rather want to have it running with the monitors turned off.

I do understand why this feature exists since a lot of users might forget to turn off power save on their pc's and have their monitors turn off during a performance - but maybe there could be a setting to toggle this feature on or off?

Best regards,

Ludvig Fjell
Qruxel Productions

[Arvol]

Why not just turn you machines completely off at the end of the day? That seems like a much safer solution. Computers need to be rebooted anyways.

[QRUXEL]

Why not just turn you machines completely off at the end of the day? That seems like a much safer solution. Computers need to be rebooted anyways.

Well, even though it's a fair point that computers do need to be rebooted - most of our producers connect remotely to the computers in the studio when they prepare things from home. Apart from that - electronics have a tendency to have a longer life when they are not power cycled as often - it's when the equipment is being booted up with cold components that usually causes damage.

so, answer not accepted =)

[Arvol]

As someone with an electronics engineering degree and over a decade in the computer science industry I respectfully disagree.
When putting your computer into sleep mode, you are literally shutting everything down while keeping your RAM awake. This allows for a quick boot since the RAM stores the last state your computer was in. (Hibernate stores this to the hard disk and completely shuts the computer down).

The #1 cause of any electronic hardware failure is heat. Keeping things running slowly breaks down your components and will shorten their shelf life, this is how electronics works. When waking from sleep, it's the same thing as waking from a cold boot in terms of temperature of your components. The only difference is the boot time is much faster as the RAM is still active and picks up from your last stored state.
Now rebooting several times a day is not advised

Rebooting is also nice to give your RAM a break. Sometimes you need to reboot to get your RAM back to a nice clean slate. Not to mention that keeping your RAM active while the rest of your computer rests really shortens the life of your RAM.

If you producers remote in, How are they connecting to the machines while they are turned off (Sleep more, Hibernate mode, or just Powered off)? WoL? WoL hasn't been the most stable solution for me in the past.
Is there anyone on site that can turn these machines on before your producers need to gain access?
Setting up a power on schedule via the UEFI might be a good solution? You would just need to inform the producers that anything before said time will not be an option.

I honestly don't see this request happening (I could be wrong). But in the meantime you can try the WoL method to get your machines turned back on (this has worked about 70% of the time for me in the past), Sounds like you have this method already figured out.

Then I would just write a batch file that would send keystrokes to turn off the Resolume output (ctrl+shift+d),) followed by the call to sleep command, and just have your people use that batch file to put your machines to sleep.
Then write another batch file that opens Resolume and then sends a keystroke to turn on the output again (ctrl+shigt+1) with obvious timing delays and offsets to get it all right) and have that batch file triggered via event trigger menu every time your machine wakes up from sleeping.
I'm sure there are other ways to automate this, but this one makes sense to me and probably will take the least amount of programming to make work?

I'm more than happy to help and brainstorm with you. Not trying to be disrespectful either, just keeping things realistic for you

EDIT: Forgot to ask, are you running OSX or Windows? I read PC so I just assumed you meant Windows

[QRUXEL]

I feel that this is getting a bit OT now =) - I mean, you might be right when it comes to why parts die but I really don't want to turn off/hibernate nor put our pcs/mediaservers to sleep and one reason is like you say - WoL is not a reliable solution if we need to remotely connect to them. We also have clients who sync files from these mediaservers.

So instead we send a signal to turn off the monitors while keeping the PC power level to S0 ( using SendMessage with SC_MONITORPOWER , POWER_OFF in user32.dll.. and, yes - we're using the windows platform as you had guessed)

I did try to disable the resolume output but it doesn't matter - Resolume keeps turning on any monitor that has entered powersave anyways - so the only way I could do it is if the batch/powershell file kills the process - but I really don't want to do that either because of the risk of losing work of a composition if someone is working on something.

I can send you the powershell script we're using if you wanna try it for yourself, and if you have any other ideas I'd be happy to hear them out. If anyone knows how the system is able to keep the monitors awake it could open up for a way to circumvent it - like if there is something that randomly moves the mouse pointer a pixel from time to time?

Best regards

Ludvig Fjell
Qruxel Productions

[Arvol]

So are you putting the computers to sleep or just putting the monitors into powersave mode?
I was able to put my computer to sleep WITH Resolume outputting content.
When I woke the PC up Resolume had crashed.
I doubt using a hardwar eedid spoofer would help:
https://www.adorama.com/us1312959.html

I would be more interested in what is causing the monitors to turn back on? is it an event trigger caused by Windows seeing that there is media being played? I have a feeling that this would be more of a Windows routine/action than a program specific action. Find out out what the standard operating procedure of the OS is when there is media being played or an OS state being called to action when something triggers it. Finding that root cause and fixing it might be the way to approach this? Can you play media from VLC or Windows Media Player onto that monitor and see if you get the same result?

Ultimately I wonder if putting a monitor into power save mode will disconnect it from the OS and in result crash Resolume, Like my results did when I put the computer into sleep mode.
If it's just the monitors you want to turn off, then maybe plugging in one of those hardware edid spoofers to your PC's output then connecting the monitor to that, and powering off your monitor would be another option, to keep your connections active but turn off the screens? (Obviously more steps involved that way than using powershell).

[Zoltán]

I was able to put my computer to sleep WITH Resolume outputting content.
When I woke the PC up Resolume had crashed.

Try switching off DMA textures in the Resolume video preferences.