I also have a question about what settings are "optimal" for preserving the life of my projector bulb.
If your TV, like mine, has an automatic power-down feature when there is no input signal for a time (mine shuts down after 15 minutes with no signal), then you can effectively use DPMS "suspend" mode to shut off your TV automatically.
There's no problem with losing the picture during video playback even with fairly aggressive DPMS settings, because mplayer disables DPMS while it's running and xine sends fake X events every few seconds to simulate user activity. I would suppose the Myth live TV player does something similar (I don't have any TV signal; we just watch movies).
To get my TV to shut off, I use a five-minute inactivity timeout for DPMS "suspend" mode. Something like:
xset dpms 240 280 300
But that will only work if xine is not currently running. So, I added "-pq" to the command line options to xine, which causes it to exit when the video ends. 20 minutes later, assuming no user activity, the TV will turn off.
Maybe this is really obvious to everyone else here, but I found it quite nice that I could get the TV to turn off automatically.
What I'm unsure about is what is really best for the life of the bulb. Clearly electricity usage is optimized by shutting off as quickly as practically possible, but I know that many electrical components suffer more damage due to the heating and cooling associated with on/off cycles than they do by simply being left on all the time. Does anyone have any idea what usage pattern maximizes the lifetime of the bulbs in projectors and projection TVs?
Thanks,
Shawn. _______________________________________________ mythtv-users mailing list [email protected] http://mythtv.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mythtv-users
