How to stop screensaver from avtivating while watching TV

[pinchari]

I recently put together a new computer, and installed a TV card. But when I watch TV on WinFast PVR2 (the software that comes with the card) the screensaver will go off in the middle, even if the TV is on full-screen. How can I deactivate the scrensaver from going during full-screen programs??

[guns1inger]

Unfortunately, Winfast PVR doesn't provide a mechanism to block screen savers from running, as some other players do. So you have two choices. Either don't run a screen saver at all, or turn it off when you are watching TV.

I don't use a screen saver, because most of them eat too much CPU, so when I am encoding or rendering I just let the monitor power off. This doesn't happen when PVR2 is running, so it isn't an issue.

If you don't want to manually switch off the screen saver every time, you could have a look at this handy little tool : http://nkprod.ro/nmacro/

You can use this to create a small exe that will turn off your screen saver and start up PVR2 for you. You could create another one to turn the screen saver back on again.

I suspect that there are in fact freeware tools to do the same thing with screen savers, but nmacro is handy to have anyway.

[Squash]

I use a small (9KB), free program named caffe1ne. It simulates a shift-key press every 59 seconds. Never used it with WinPVR but should work. Very low overhead. You can read more about it & download here:
http://www.snapfiles.com/get/caffeine.html