Prevent display from turning off due to inactivity when watching full screen video (windows 7)

Question

In power options the monitor is configured to turn off (go to power saving mode) after 10 minutes of inactivity. The problem is it also turns itself off when I watch long YouTube videos in full screen.

I like power saving, so the default behavior is OK, but it shouldn't kick in when I watch fullscreen videos.

Is there a way to fix it?

Answer 1

But there is a workaround:

https://mousejiggler.codeplex.com/

Make sure you use the Zen Jiggle mode to avoid any onscreen interference with your viewing pleasure.

Answer 2

Actually the software CAN ask windows to turn power saving off. Thats how media players do it. But when you watch youtube or other flash videos it is the browser that's running, nothing else. There is a flash plugin but this is a plugin, it only has access to the same things the browser has. If the browser does not provide access to power saving management the plugin can't access it. So the only way for that to be solved would be that browsers could have a new feature that would disable power saving when you visit some certain sites or has the ability to manage power saving and somehow passes that access to third party plugins. I don't see there is another way. or, you could go to the start menu and click on power options (search it) and then once your in you can click on a thing that let's you change how long until the computer goes into sleep mode.

Answer 3

Maybe it depends on the browser and the operating system, but I can tell you that using Firefox 32.0.1 in Windows 7 64-bit, whenever a sound is played by the Flash plugin, it prevents the display from turning off. This can be seen by running powercfg -requests while a sound is playing (run cmd.exe as an administrator before typing the command):

C:\Windows\system32>powercfg -requests
DISPLAY:
[PROCESS] \Device\HarddiskVolume1\Program Files (x86)\Mozilla Firefox\firefox.exe

SYSTEM:
[DRIVER] IDT High Definition Audio CODEC (HDAUDIO\FUNC_01&VEN_111D&DEV_76DF&SUBSYS_1028053F&REV_1002\4&313bea4d&0&0001)
An audio stream is currently in use.

AWAYMODE:
None.

Two things are shown in this example output. It's the firefox.exe process under DISPLAY: that is preventing the display from turning off. The sound playing through the audio driver prevents the system from going to sleep.

I consider Firefox's behavior undesirable, as I seldom watch long YouTube videos, and I don't want every message notification from Facebook Chat to turn my screen on. The behavior can be changed by using a powercfg -REQUESTSOVERRIDE command, like this:

powercfg -REQUESTSOVERRIDE process "\Device\HarddiskVolume1\Program Files (x86)\Mozilla Firefox\firefox.exe" display

Type powercfg /? for help.

Answer 4

I suspect there's some arcane reason that apps don't inherently have access to the power-saving settings, or it'd be a big no-brainer for Windows Media Player to have a "disable power saving" switch.

The best workaround I can think of is to set up 2 power-profile shortcuts, and remember to swap between them before & after watching video. It's hack, but it should work. Now all I need to do is figure out how to kick this in from across the network, when we're streaming from the DVR. ;)

Answer 5

Disable this "power saving feature" as it becomes counter productive whenever it turns off your displays while you're in the middle of watching a video/movie. Instead turn off your monitor and other displays using the power button on the display whenever you go AFK.

Answer 6

Maybe power saving looks for apps running in full screen mode but does not find any, because it's only the plug-in that's in full screen. Can you try setting the display mode of the browser to full screen (not maximized) before playing the video und check what happens then? Both Firefox and IE have full screen display modes.

Answer 7

You could also a small utility called Full Throttle Override to automatically switch power plans whenever the Flash Player (or your favorite video player) is launched. (I added FlashPlayerPlugin_16_0_0_296.exe, for example).

You just have to make sure to set Turn off the display to Never in your High performance power plan. (Unfortunately the app doesn't support to switch to a specified power plan other than High performance)

I had a short test run using mplayer.exe and the utility successfully switched to High performance and back to my default power plan while having a memory footprint of about 9.3MB (on Windows 8.1 x64)