Do I Have To Have Tv Playing All The Time

[Bathman]

My HTPC lives in my bedroom. The system is totally fanless so the only noise made is by the hard drive. Which is keeping me awake at night. At the moment there is no way I can turn off the TV. If I could stop the TV playing then windows power manager would kick in and turn off the hard drive therefore everything would be quiet. Until I have an overnight recording when it would kick back in again - and hopefully not wake me up.

 

Thus getting to the point. Is there anyway that I can keep the application running without the TV displaying a picture and thus allowing my hard drive to stop.

 

I would like to buy a laptop harddrive in the future which would undoublty help but I am a bit sort of cash at the moment.

 

Thanks

[Oliver]

You might go for a Samsung Spinpoint hdd. I recently bought one and it's really quiet.

[Lars_MQ]

You could have the system wake up for recordings by the scheduler. So the system only starts from hybernation or standby if needed. Have a look at the scheduler plugin in the memberssection.

[yaRincewind]

I am trying to install 2 CF cards as a Raid0 in a few days/weeks, so the system is booting XP and loading DVBViewer from these cards, so there is no spinning hard-drive needed while normal running.

 

Just a few things to keep in mind, so the swap file may not be on the CF cards, and writing on these cards should be completly forbidden anyway. Any kind of timeshifting of course would destroy the effect anyway. But this could help.

 

To your question, the display of video in fact can be disabled in the DVBViewer. It is hidden under an icon right, named "recording controll". There is on the button AV controll, there audio and video can be switched off.

[Bathman]

I actullly have a samsung spinpoint harddive and I never heard it until I built my latest totally fanless system.

 

Also thank you yaRincewind you method does work however I am after a totally remote controlled system.

 

The way I have managed to do this is to make the smart buffer large 100mg and although the TV picture is still playing all the time the hard drive does spin down.

 

Thanks