not working? "Ignore sleep prevention requests from applications such as media playback"

[scottcopus]

Hi,

In my testing on Win11, the "Ignore sleep prevention requests from applications such as media playback" setting only seems to work when Windows Media Player (modern one--not the legacy one) is playing full-screen. When modern WMP isn't full screen, idle logoffs still occur. I've also tried other apps too (VLC, legacy WMP, browsers @youtube or podcasts) and they also idle-logoff whether full-screen or not.

Does anyone else have this experience or have a solution? It would be nice to implement idle-logoff on a classroom instructor computer to prevent idle logoff if they are playing any video or just audio too.

Devs:
I found that the command "powercfg.exe /requests" seems to always indicate that some audio or video is playing--at least on Win10/11. Tip: Create a batch file that continuously runs this command. This led me to find the project @ https://github.com/diversenok/Powercfg (which itself has dependencies @ https://github.com/diversenok/phnt). This project queries the low level Windows API to extract the info that the command shows. Any thoughts on implementing this? Or if I can figure how to implement it within idle-logoff's source code, would you accept a PR?

cheers,
Scott

[ryannewington]

Hi Scott,

By default we query the APIs used by powercfg, and if any apps are requesting DISPLAY mode, then we do not idle log off.

The "ignore sleep prevention requests" setting overrides this and tells the app to ignore any apps which have said 'dont sleep im doing something' and log off anyway.

Are you saying that these media players in question are NOT setting the DISPLAY flag? Or that Idle log off is ignoring the DISPLAY flag?

Ryan

[scottcopus]

Doh. Yep, I had that setting completely backwards in my mind. Sorry about that. With it default unchecked, it works as it should.

However, one potential issue I've noticed is that with this setting CHECKED and some full-screen videos are playing, the idle logoff warning message is behind the video. This might be dependent on the video player though. Is always-on-top/foreground assigned to this window?

What are your thoughts on if there's only audio playing and prevent idle logoff based on it? I've heard reports of some instructors playing background music/white noise/etc. during class and this obviously has no effect on idle logoff prevention. However, the playing of audio is detected by powercfg. But I also realize that audio playback itself could be problematic since Windows can play audio occasionally by itself such as sound scheme events. The only method I can think of to allow idle logoff to continue to work while ignoring short audio playbacks would be to confirm that no audio is playing during the last X times that idle time (or powercfg readings) is checked. Thoughts?

[stale]

This issue has been automatically marked as stale because it has not had recent activity. It will be closed if no further activity occurs. Thank you for your contributions.

[ryannewington]

It is set to always-on-top, but yeah, there's not much that can be done about full screen mode windows taking priority.

Audio is tricky. I'd need to have a think about that one.

@ryannewington There maybe some sort of bug in this software. I have a couple of computers (6) running windows 11 connected to my windows server. I have deployed & configured logoff software via Group policy. My domain is very simple, nothing complicated. Also not many applications running on my windows 11 terminals either. Clean windows 11 24h2 and all I have installed is Adobe, chrome, edge, new windows media player, NAPS2 scanner app. That's it. But for some reason the software is not picking up awake request from chrome, chrome is what we use most of the time for most tasks and also being used for watching video sometimes in full screen or windowed/tab. This glitch is not very consistent. So I cannot reproduce this glitch. Is there a way to create log ? or at least need to find a way to make this app a priority so that the notification doesn't get stuck in background .

[scottcopus]

@thomask4380
By terminals, do you mean server-provided RDP sessions? Or regular client desktops?
Have you tried anything older than 24H2?
Can you run "C:\Program Files (x86)\Lithnet\IdleLogoff\Lithnet.IdleLogoff.exe" & attach a pic of its settings?
Can you run ">powercfg.exe /requests" while video is playing and attach its output?

FYI, some logs can be found in Event Viewer, Application log, Source=Lithnet.idlelogoff, or via PS:

Get-EventLog -LogName Application -Source Lithnet.idlelogoff

@ryannewington Regular client desktops. All our terminals are brand new. Nothing older than 24H2, but no I haven't tried anything older. I will try to run the commands & logs when I get a chance and post it here