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[Magicland]

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.

[JimH]

MC doesn't do that.  It's an interesting idea.

I'm not sure, but there may be a way to get that to work on any activity.  I've never used this feature of an Ethernet port but I think I've seen that it has different settings possible.

[hit_ny]

I'm not sure, but there may be a way to get that to work on any activity.

i think a ping could do it. ping server, then press play on MC.

make a batch file that pings the music server once and also includes a cmd line play for MC.

create a taskbar button that calls above batch file.

[Mastiff]

That depends. If it wakes up from the IP address, it'll pretty much wake up from any network activity. What you need is something that wakes up using the MAC address. There are "Magic Packet" senders that you can use in a command line just as easy as you're pinging.

[Magicland]

MC doesn't do that.  It's an interesting idea.

I'm not sure, but there may be a way to get that to work on any activity.  I've never used this feature of an Ethernet port but I think I've seen that it has different settings possible.

Obviously, I'm not looking for such a feature in this release, but it might be something to consider for the future (or might even be possible to be configured as a plugin). There's a good bit of information on the subject (as well as both command-line and GUI "wakeup" utilities) available at http://www.depicus.com/wake-on-lan/

[hit_ny]

Hey magic, why not try what i suggested. Otherwise u might be in for long wait.

[Robert Taylor]

A ping will not wake machines up using WOL; "magic packets" must be BROADCAST on the local LAN only to wake machines which are in the correct state to be woken up.

OOOPS - I just found out that's not strictly true. Windows Xp certainly has the ability to specify what sort of packets will cause WOL to happen. Look under the "Power Management" tab on your NICs hardware properties.

Could a plugin be written that would allow you to specify all your machines MAC addresses, and perhaps Media Scheduler could use this info, to automagically wake up a machine and start playing at a certain time (I always wanted to turn my PC into a huge digital clock radio kinda thingy, but I could never find the fonts to imitate those horrible old metal flaps which were used to display the numbers before the invention of "real" digital clocks - anyone who doesn't know WTF I'm talking about is obviously too young to remember such monstrosities).

It's important to note that on board LAN interfaces will most likely be WOL compatible, but if you have a PCI NIC in your PC, you may need to attach a WOL cable between the motherboard and the NIC.

[hit_ny]

ok so "plain" ping is no go, u need a "magic packet" ping.

you would have to setup "Add to playing now" to just queue, rather than playing immediately.

After that the play button on the taskbar might do it.

If you have not been using the custom task bar buttons to play/stop etc  MC i suggest u give it a shot, quite handy. Search the forum, recall Marko having explained it quite well some time back.

I was wondering whether they could be a chicken-egg situation with the above. Meaning that when queuing up the files that MC would check first that they actually existed and then not finding them (since the other box is asleep). If this does not apply then things should be fine. Otherwise the taskbar button will only be good when starting up MC.

[10sne1]

Why not always leave it on??