I've got MC10 set up on a PC which I'm using as my "music server". For the most part, it'll just use the songs which are stored on its hard drive locally, as a stereo component which I'm using to replace 2 sony 200 CD Jukeboxes, with MC10 as the "frontend" to a much more "wife friendly" method of sorting through a moderate CD collection and playing music (plus, it looks really neat
).
Because I want the PC to function much as a stereo component (including fast on/off switching), I've set it up to use S3 standby. For those not familiar with the term, windows stores the system configuration in ram, and then shuts down just about everything else, while maintaining power to the ram throught the motherboard. It uses almost no power when in this mode, and yet can go from "off" (standby) to a fully powered state just as I left it (with MC10 and anything else such as Girder running) in under 5 seconds. No booting, no loading device drivers, just press the power button and it's on and running (and vice-versa for shutdown). Works great with the power button from my remote, to both turn "off" and turn back "on".
The only problem is that I occasionally want to access the music from one of my other computers. This is no problems when its on, but when it's off, I'd like to find some way to turn it on.
There's a common feature called "wake on lan" which allows the network card to remain powered and wait for a "magic packet" to be delivered which will wake up the computer, supported by most motherboards, lan cards, etc., and there are some utilities which will allow you to send this packet to wake a card if you know the mac address and the IP address.
Is there any way for Media Center to do this? It would be a really useful feature, as you could just select a song to play on one computer, and not have to worry if the music server is on or off. If it's on, fine, it plays like normal, but if it's off, it could wake the machine, and play the song as soon as it's available. It might even be possible for a plug-in to be written to do this if it isn't currently possible.